Here's your Forbes Daily Briefing for Friday, May 30th. Today on Forbes, the 2025 Midas list,

the world's best venture capital investors in 2025. The long freeze for initial public offerings

and mergers appears to be thawing, and in one corner of the startup market, deals are running white-hot.

In 2025, a small cohort of mega-startups like SpaceX, OpenAI, and Stripe, now command supersized

valuations, rarely seen for private companies. And their earliest backers are now surging

ahead in the Midas list,

Forbes's ranking of the world's top venture capitalists. Produced in partnership with Truebridge

Capital Partners, the 24th annual Midas list, which was released this past Tuesday, is again

topped by Alfred Lynn. While the Sequoia investor continues to reap the benefits of early bets on Airbnb

and DoorDash, which both went public in 2020, a 2021 investment in OpenAI at a $14 billion valuation

now adds to a staying power. The chat GPT maker is currently valued at $300 billion after raising a $40 billion round in April,

a new record for the most money raised by a private startup.

It's not just OpenAI.

The surging valuations of startups like SpaceX, Databricks, and Anthropic accounts for

eight of the 15 newcomers joining this year's Midas

list.

Investors, Sean McGuire, and Kraft Ventures' David Sacks, have broken into the list

for the first time, largely thanks to bets on Elon Musk's projects, notably SpaceX,

now the world's most valuable private company after raising earlier this year at

$350 billion.

Sachs is joining four members of the so-called PayPal Mafia, who are stalwarts on the list.

The payments company's former CEO, Reid Hoffman, and former CEO Peter Thiel, now rank

...