Picking Private Market Winners: Maggie Fanari on SpaceX, Anthropic & Stripe

Maggie Fanari’s approach to private-market investing starts with backing exceptional founders tackling difficult, consequential problems. Private investments make up about one-third of RIT Capital Partners’ portfolio, and Fanari says the opportunity is to identify strong companies early while accepting that not every investment will succeed. She sees selectivity, access to promising companies and specialist managers, and a long-term view as essential to generating alpha.

SpaceX illustrates both the potential and the discipline involved. Fanari first invested in the company in 2019, at her previous job, when it was valued at $35 billion. At RIT, SpaceX became her first private-portfolio investment, made at a valuation of about $200 billion; it has since returned more than four times the investment in a relatively short period. That performance has made the holding outsized relative to other positions, so she expects to trim it. She still sees Starship becoming nearly fully reusable as a possible game changer, supporting ambitions such as orbital data centers and fewer, larger Starlink satellites, but cautions that SpaceX needs substantial growth to justify its current multiples.

Fanari sees possible merits in a Tesla–SpaceX merger because both businesses are hardware-focused and could connect to AI, robotics, and growth in the space industry. She does not treat a merger as automatic: it would require substantial review, including consideration of two corporate-governance committees and Tesla’s 50% outside ownership. The potential strategic fit, in her view, has to be weighed against those governance and ownership issues.

RIT invested in Anthropic in the second half of 2025, around September, at a valuation starting at $170 billion, and participated in follow-on rounds. Wilfrid Frost said Anthropic had filed its S-1 the day before the interview; Fanari said the filing showed the company was cash-flow positive, with revenue in the billions and growing roughly 10 to 16 times. She argues that Anthropic’s enterprise focus may support premium pricing: customers handling sensitive work may prefer a trusted, secure provider to an open-source model. Her preference is for higher-margin products, premium market segments, and companies with a strong competitive lead. She expects Anthropic to be worth more than $1 trillion and said reported low-end expectations of $1.5 trillion to $2 trillion would represent an exceptional return from RIT’s investment.

Stripe is another recent private-market position. RIT established it earlier in the year and participated in its most recent round at a valuation of about $160 billion. Fanari says Stripe is building infrastructure that lets AI agents transact, and counts Anthropic and OpenAI among its customers; its brand and trust have also benefited the business. RIT’s investment in Cognition represents a separate part of its AI thesis: agentic AI that can complete knowledge-economy tasks end to end without a human co-pilot. RIT invested in May at a valuation of roughly $24 billion to $25 billion, and after a September raise the valuation was around $48 billion. Fanari cited Cognition’s extraordinary growth and its founder as reasons for interest.

Direct AI investments are close to 10% of RIT’s portfolio, rising to about 20% under an aggressive estimate that includes fund investments; Fanari said this remains below current index exposure. RIT holds much of its AI exposure privately to limit exposure in quoted equities and to seek uncorrelated assets. Fanari is willing to hold companies for the long term if they maintain strong growth and management, while recognizing that AI is a structural change with a multi-year, potentially decade-long runway and that picking winners remains difficult.

Fanari describes RIT’s aim as limiting participation in down markets while capturing more equity-market gains, with downside participation in the mid-30% range and upside capture above 70%. She sees the NAV discount as cyclical: RIT traded at a premium for a long period, most recently around 2018–2019, and she expects the discount to narrow over time. With growth of around 10–12% or somewhat better in recent years, a dividend yield of roughly 1.5–1.8%, and possible discount narrowing, she characterizes RIT as a mid-teens compounding instrument. Her broader advice is to keep investing simple, avoid overcomplication, and focus on the big picture.