Photo courtesy of STOCK

By Ashley King

Two of the largest offerings of this era — SpaceX’s record-setting listing in June and Anthropic’s public filing on Monday — were supposed to tell us something new about American capitalism.

Look at who was invited to distribute them, and the picture is an old one. Anthropic’s prospectus names Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley first among its underwriters, followed by JPMorgan, Citigroup, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, and the rest of the familiar syndicate.

Its lawyers are Wilson Sonsini and Freshfields.

SpaceX’s syndicate told the same story. T

here is no Black-owned or minority-owned underwriter or law firm that appears on the public record in either deal.

This is not about symbolism. Underwriting a deal of this size carries fees, builds the track record that wins the next mandate, and places a firm in the room where pricing and allocation are decided. When the same firms handle every generational offering, the economics of each new boom flow through the same channels, and everyone outside them starts the next cycle further behind.

That matters more now because AI is becoming the infrastructure beneath hiring, credit, investment, and work itself. If Black firms, investors, and founders are absent from the capital formation of the companies building it, they will have less say in how the technology is governed and less capital to fund the next generation of builders.

Anthropic organized itself as a public benefit corporation, with a trust electing most of its board and a founders’ shareholding 50.1 percent of the vote, to protect its mission from short-term pressure.

That answers who controls powerful technology. It leaves unanswered who gets to participate in the wealth it creates.

The test will not be found in any company’s mission statement. It will be found in the next prospectus — in whether the list of names on the cover finally looks different from the last one. Note: The Anthropic syndicate is drawn from the cover of its S-1 filed Oct. 26, 2026; its offering has not yet been priced.

The SpaceX syndicate is drawn from reported coverage of its June offering.
mrashleyking@gmail.com