![](\"https:\/\/fortune.com\/img-assets\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/GettyImages-2281285182-e1783708594987.jpg?w=2048\")
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With SpaceX trading around $2 trillion, Anthropic raising at a $965 billion post-money valuation, and OpenAI is expected to follow, we\u2019re in for a hot IPO summer. <\/p>\n
Add in a steady stream of smaller offerings\u2014from Jersey Mike\u2019s to Bending Spoons\u2014and wealth advisors are bracing for a fairly compressed window in which employees who joined these companies on modest salaries are about to become extremely, suddenly rich. While Fortune <\/em>is looking to coin \u201cIPO Bros\u201d for this special class of soon-to-be-filthy-rich cohort, they also present a category of client that family offices haven\u2019t dealt with at this scale before.<\/p>\n \u201cI don\u2019t know what are we calling them, like I feel like we need like a term for them,\u201d Catherine Fankhauser, a partner and practice leader for family enterprise and family office advisory services at EY, told Fortune <\/em>before the conversation landed, half-jokingly, on \u201cIPO bros.\u201d She said regardless of the name, \u201cyou don\u2019t take a course in college that tells you how to be an ultra-high net worth individual\u201d\u2014so these newly wealthy employees need to get their finances in order fast.<\/p>\n Whatever the label ends up landing, both Fankhauser and Peter Epstein, a managing director at Allocate\u2014a firm that helps registered investment advisors and wealth management firms access private-market investment opportunities\u2014described this group as rather distinct from the ultra-wealthy client family offices already know. Now, as a hot IPO summer enters full swing, we\u2019re posing a question for family offices and these new UHNWI alike: What to do with all this new wealth?<\/p>\n \u201cI think it\u2019s much broader than that, in terms of this really being a compressed wealth creation window, inclusive of potentially Anthropic, potentially OpenAI,\u201d Epstein told Fortune<\/em>. He pointed to the scale of it as the real story: Facebook went public in 2012 at roughly $100 billion, and Google and Amazon went public in the late 1990s at valuations far below that. SpaceX\u2019s $2 trillion figure, he said, reflects \u201ca significant amount of runway that\u2019s now essentially generating that return potential within private markets that historically wasn\u2019t the case.\u201d<\/p>\n That scale is exactly what\u2019s forcing family offices and wealth managers to treat this year\u2019s IPO class as its own category. \u201cIrrespective of whether it\u2019s a janitor or an executive, that\u2019s still a concentrated stock position in terms of their equity exposure within that respective company,\u201d Epstein said, noting lifestyle planning, liquidity management, retirement planning, and tuition costs all get more complicated when that position is worth tens of millions of dollars overnight.<\/p>\n Fankhauser said the infrastructure now absorbing this new class of wealth didn\u2019t spring up overnight. Instead, it\u2019s the product of a five-to-seven-year buildout tied to a broader run of liquidity events and SPACs. <\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s been a trend that we\u2019ve been seeing for the last several years that the marketplace has had an influx, a really significant influx,\u201d she said. That means today\u2019s newly wealthy employees are stepping into a far more built-out system than earlier generations of the newly rich had access to. <\/p>\n \u201cThey\u2019ve got the opportunity to really stand on the shoulders of those who came before them in a way that wasn\u2019t possible maybe 10, 15 years ago,\u201d she added.<\/p>\n Much of that infrastructure now lives inside banks and financial institutions that have built out captive family office services like technology, accounting, bill pay, and art advisory, which were originally meant to deepen relationships with existing billionaire clients. Newly liquid employees, Fankhauser said, can often plug into those same bundled services even if their own payout wouldn\u2019t justify standing up a single-family office on its own.<\/p>\n But access to the infrastructure is only part of the shift. Family offices are also changing how they build trust with this cohort, Fankhauser said, pointing to the now widely known story of an early tech-company employee who worked in a company cafeteria before an IPO made her wealthy. <\/p>\n \u201cIf you\u2019re in a position where you may be less familiar with the types of products that are out there or the choices you have, having someone there to provide advice to guide you feels a little bit more comfortable than you trying to get educated yourself,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n The bigger behavioral shift family offices are adjusting to, Fankhauser said, is that this new wealth doesn\u2019t act like inherited wealth. <\/p>\n \u201cThere\u2019s something about that entrepreneurial spirit where the structure of a family office doesn\u2019t always feel great,\u201d she said. \u201cIf I\u2019m a founder who\u2019s used to running through walls and breaking a lot of glass along the way, structure may not always be the best fit.\u201d<\/p>\n Whether that founder mindset persists among this summer\u2019s newly liquid employees or eventually gives way to a more conventional, structured approach to generational wealth is still an open question, she said: \u201cI\u2019ll be interested to see where the distribution falls.\u201d<\/p>\n Epstein noted companies like SpaceX, Anthropic, and OpenAI had already given employees chances to sell shares through tender offers as private companies, so for many, this isn\u2019t their first liquidity event. But going public, he said, is still \u201ca very significant moment,\u201d both for wealth and estate planning and for what employees decide to do with their careers next.<\/p>\n This, both he and Fankhauser said, will be the biggest distinction between how family offices worked in the past to preserve wealth, as opposed to these \u201cIPO Bros\u201d who are less risk-averse and more likely to found their own companies. Epstein pointed to Facebook\u2019s 2012 IPO, after which many employees went on to found their own companies, start venture funds, or launch private market platforms.<\/p>\n \u201cI think that unlock is underestimated in terms of what do those employees not just do with the current liquidity, but what do they think about as part of the next phase of their careers,\u201d he said. <\/p>\n \u201cTalking about SpaceX in particular, there are some incredibly talented employees that are there that I think could be very well become the next generation of founders that could be in areas like defense tech, that could be in areas like what does space look like over the next 10 years,\u201d he added. \u201cThose employees essentially become the next wave of founders.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n #summers #hottest #IPOs #minting #class #ultrahighnetworth #IPO #Bros<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" With SpaceX trading around $2 trillion, Anthropic raising at a $965 billion post-money valuation, and OpenAI is expected to follow, we\u2019re in for a hot IPO summer. Add in a… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":11589,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[536,1772,6814,10440,13085,3669,22,2040,2400,166,13086,735,1843,11680,13087],"class_list":["post-11588","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-finance-news","tag-anthropic","tag-bros","tag-class","tag-ernst-young","tag-going-public","tag-hottest","tag-investment","tag-ipo","tag-ipos","tag-markets","tag-minting","tag-openai","tag-spacex","tag-summers","tag-ultrahighnetworth"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11588","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11588"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11588\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/11589"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11588"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11588"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11588"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}An industry retooling for a new set of clients<\/strong><\/h2>\n
Founder money, not inheritance money<\/strong><\/h2>\n