Analysis
Alphabet's Q2 2026 filing disclosed that its Google subsidiary now holds $94.1 billion in SpaceX shares -- roughly a 6% stake -- after SpaceX's June IPO required the holding to be reclassified from cost-method private equity to marketable securities. Of that stake, $80 billion carries short-term sale restrictions and $14.1 billion is restricted through the third quarter of 2027, meaning the vast majority of the position isn't immediately liquid.
Bloomberg separately reported that Alphabet's roughly 14% stake in Anthropic jumped to approximately $124.3 billion in value, after Anthropic's own valuation nearly tripled from $380 billion to $965 billion during the second quarter. Combined, the two positions generated close to $98 billion in unrealized gains that flowed through Alphabet's "other income" line and helped drive a record $112.1 billion quarterly profit.
The filing is a genuinely striking illustration of how much paper wealth now sits inside strategic tech investors' balance sheets tied to AI and space-industry equity rather than core operating businesses. Alphabet's own stock fell roughly 7% the same day on capex-guidance concerns unrelated to these gains -- investors, in other words, are willing to look past even a record quarterly profit number when it's substantially inflated by unrealized markups on illiquid or restricted positions rather than operating cash flow.
For VCs and LPs, the disclosure is a preview of what OpenAI's and Anthropic's eventual full public listings -- both reportedly targeting late 2026 or 2027 IPO windows -- could do to the balance sheets of every strategic investor holding stakes in them, Microsoft included on the OpenAI side. It also underscores how concentrated AI-adjacent paper wealth has become among a handful of the largest strategic and sovereign investors rather than being broadly distributed.
Watch whether Alphabet's restricted SpaceX shares become sellable on schedule given SpaceX's own post-IPO stock decline, and whether Anthropic's own IPO, still targeted around October 2026, validates or complicates the $965 billion mark Alphabet's stake is currently based on.
