Wall Street banks gave wealthy clients radically different fee structures to access Anthropic's February capital raise, a 30 billion dollar round that valued the Claude-maker at 350 billion dollars and included Singapore's sovereign wealth fund, Coatue and Nvidia. Morgan Stanley charged a flat 1% placement fee. Goldman Sachs used a multi-layered structure — a 1.25% management fee plus 17.5% carried interest on profits above an 8% return — unusual for a single-company vehicle where banks typically charge only a small placement fee and a nominal maintenance fee.
The disparity creates the prospect that two investors in the exact same deal earn materially different returns depending on which bank they used. Goldman framed its structure as consistent with acting as a fiduciary co-investor alongside ultra-wealthy clients (average account size around 70 million dollars). Morgan Stanley said its scale enabled access "without management or carry fees, similar to what institutions receive", and did not act as a fiduciary (offering the deal without a recommendation). Typical Morgan Stanley wealth accounts are 20 million dollars or more.
Context: retail and wealth investors are playing an increasingly central role in the run-up to mega-IPOs for Anthropic, OpenAI and SpaceX. OpenAI raised 3 billion dollars from retail as part of its record 122 billion dollar round last month. Wall Street is using proprietary vehicles to get these clients into deals early — but how they price access now varies considerably, and the lack of standardisation will be in regulators' sights. Source: Financial Times, 24 April 2026, Harriet Clarfelt, Joshua Franklin, Eric Platt and George Hammond.