The upcoming initial public offerings of SpaceX, Anthropic and OpenAI are set to create a windfall for those companies’ employees and early investors. As a result, industry experts expect to see an increase in demand for wealth management and multi-family office services, as well as the establishment of new family offices, each needing its own CIO, following numerous liquidity events.
The rapidly increasing valuations of the companies have led to significant wealth creation in short periods of time. Publicly listing Friday at a $1.75 trillion valuation, the Space Exploration Technologies Corp.—founded in 2002—was valued at $33.3 billion in a 2019 funding round. OpenAI Group PBC, now valued at $852 billion, was valued at just $1 billion in 2019, when it began offering equity.
Anthropic PBC, founded in 2021, raised $124 million in a Series A round that year and was valued at $4 billion following the close of its Series B in 2023. Three years later, the company is currently valued at $965 billion, following a $65 billion Series H fundraising round.
New Money
The SpaceX IPO alone is expected to mint 4,000 millionaires—according to analysis from private funds marketplace Hill Technologies—with as many 400 individuals expected to earn $100 million or more through IPO proceeds.
According to the Wall Street Journal, an October 2025 tender offer from OpenAI led to more than 600 current and former employees selling approximately $6.6 billion in stock, with 75 individuals walking away with $75 million each and another 150 to 250 people netting $10 million from the secondary sale.
The number of family offices and the wealth they manage has already increased significantly. A 2024 report from Deloitte noted that there were 6,130 single-family offices in 2019, growing to 8,030 in 2024 and projected to grow to 10,720 by 2030. Assets managed by these investors are expected to grow to $5.4 trillion by 2030 from $3.1 trillion in 2024, according to Deloitte.
“Historically, family office growth tends to follow major wealth creation cycles and also wealth transfer cycles, and we are in the midst of the intersection of both of those factors coming into play right now,” says Renee Neri, a partner in executive search firm Heidrick & Struggles’ global family office practice.
“The technology sector has absolutely been one of the most significant generators of new wealth over the last 20 years, and as a result the emergence of [new] family offices, there has been a heavy rise in the tech intersectionality of that industry, anticipated IPOs can create lots of new liquidity to be managed,” Neri says.
This next wave of wealth creation also has implications for how family offices invest and how existing family offices and multi-family offices hire.
Family Office Staffing
Knowledge of and familiarity with artificial intelligence and deep-tech networks could play a major factor in what family offices are looking for in future recruitment.
“I think knowledge of investing in AI is table stakes, because this is how people have made their money,” says Beata Kirr, CIO of Northern Trust’s global family office group. “I think their approach to investing going forward with their wealth will … demand a knowledge set around that theme that might be meaningfully different than the CIOs of the past had really been engaged in. It may be possible that the investment leadership skews younger and/or skews more from the world [from] which they came. It may not be traditional investment leadership; it may be AI-informed investment leadership.”
Jacob Gamble, a principal in executive search firm Cowen Partners’ family office practice, says that the type of employees at a family office generally reflects the style of the family office’s founder.
Kirr also notes that this ongoing wave of wealth creation could skew toward younger individuals and include more women than the current cohort of high-net-worth individuals and previous wealth creation cycles.
“I think if you’re going to have more women wealth creators as the leads of these family offices, historically, women have correlated more highly to the fields of impact investing and also to philanthropic interests outside of wealth creation,” Kirr says. “I think there’s implications to that as well, where you could have more demand for those themes: [a] bigger—at start—philanthropic arm and then more expertise on the impact alignment of investing.”
Additionally, newly minted family offices may need to hire investment staff members who are well versed in diversifying from concentrated positions.
“I think one of the biggest talent needs will not necessarily be what you’re investing in outside of the stock, but how to move from having such a huge position of stock to, ultimately, a more diversified portfolio,” Kirr says.
Jim Besaw, principal and CIO of multi-family-office firm GenTrust, notes that families have not intended for their holdings in such companies to be as big of a share of their net worth as they soon will be, so there is a lot of focus with clients to right-size these allocations.
“There’s a lot of focus on: How do we bring [down] that sizing?” Besaw says. “It’s not that they want to own them anymore; they don’t want them to be 20% or 30% of their net worth. So we’ve been focusing a lot on helping families understand what their options are with that.”
For existing family offices, many are already invested in these pre-IPO companies or are trying to gain access through special purpose vehicles with exposure to these companies.
Additionally, with SPVs becoming an attractive way for family offices to obtain exposure to companies like SpaceX, Anthropic and OpenAI, CIOs and investment staff that are able to effectively conduct due diligence on these often-complex, multi-layered vehicles are increasingly in demand, Besaw adds.
How Family Offices Are investing
AI continues to be a sharp thematic focus for family offices, despite concerns that the investment landscape is overheating, according to UBS’s 2026 global family office report. These investors are increasingly looking for exposure to companies that support AI, such as those focused on data centers, AI software and semiconductors.
“The family office discussion starts with those marquee names, but it’s: Where else can we look that isn’t getting a lot of notoriety right now that we can try to get into?” Gamble says. “At this point, [where] the marquee names are, you are not going to get a 10x [return] out if it when they go public. … We have a ton of companies out there now over the last 15 years [that] would have absolutely gone public pre-COVID, with multi-billion-dollar valuations and multiple billions in revenue, that have just been sitting.”
Multi-family offices like GenTrust are also exploring opportunities in AI-adjacent industries such as quantum computing.
At What Wealth Level Does a Family Office Make Sense?
According to Kirr, the $500 million threshold is an effective break-even for the pursuit of building a family office, including the cost of hiring staff and maintaining an office. The investment goals of a founder should also play into the choice between starting a family office and joining a multi-family office.
“The threshold around it really depends on what it is that you are hoping to achieve out of that office,” Neri says. “If it’s doing direct deals … if you expect to have a full, internally oriented investment team, it will be a higher [assets under management] threshold. Usually that break point we see is $1 billion and above. You will absolutely find family offices that exist below that, from $500 million to $1 billion.”
These offices, Neri says, would typically leverage external advisers more.
Gamble notes that a full-fledged family office is not the best option for all newly minted wealthy individuals, largely due to the high costs associated with building such an institution.
“The cost efficiency is where the issue is,” Gamble says. “$500 million and above tends to be where you have the apple cart tipping over where you can get enough value out of the couple million it’s costing you to run the family office a year. If you have $100 million, why would you pay 2% a year to run a full-fledged family office when a multi-family office can charge you 80 basis points and still accomplish everything you’re trying to get done?”
Tags: Family Offices