How to Raise 75 Billion Dollars? SpaceX Lures Retail Investors Into the Biggest IPO
Elon Musk’s rocket builder is planning the largest stock-market debut in history at 75 billion dollars — and it is deliberately bringing retail investors on board to do it. A dedicated IPO website, five brokers, and very low barriers to entry are meant to mobilize the masses.
On Thursday, a dedicated website for the year’s biggest market debut went live at spacexipo.com. The presentation is as sober as the promise is grand: “Building the infrastructure of the future.” Alongside the prospectus and an investor FAQ, the site also makes the roadshow presentation publicly available — the same slides that CFO Bret Johnson would normally use to work the big funds behind closed doors. The fact that these materials are freely accessible is itself part of the message: this is not meant to be a game for Wall Street alone.
The headline figures make clear why SpaceX needs the broad public. The company plans to issue roughly 555.5 million shares at 135 dollars apiece, raising 75 billion dollars — a record for an IPO. The stock is set to trade under the ticker SPCX on the Nasdaq; pricing is expected on June 11, with the first trading day slated for June 12. Notably, the shares being issued represent only about 4.2 percent of the company. The remaining nearly 96 percent stays with Musk and other insiders. At a targeted valuation of around 1.75 trillion dollars, SpaceX would suddenly be worth more than Saudi Aramco, Meta, or Tesla.
Five brokers instead of a Wall Street clique
The real lever for the retail offensive is five online brokers: SoFi, Robinhood, E*Trade, Schwab, and Fidelity. Through these platforms, retail investors can subscribe for shares — and, crucially, at the same offering price and at the same time as large institutional investors. In a classic IPO process, small investors usually get only the leftovers and have to buy the stock only after trading begins, often at significantly higher prices. The daily demand data from the five platforms flows directly back to the underwriters; Bank of America coordinates the US retail tranche.
How much will actually go to retail investors in the end is still open and depends on demand. But the order of magnitude is clear: while only 5 to 10 percent of shares historically go to retail customers in large IPOs, for SpaceX it could be up to a quarter, according to the Financial Times; Reuters had previously reported as much as 30 percent. At this volume, that would easily be 20 billion dollars or more — a sum the five platforms, with more than 10 trillion dollars in client assets under management between them, should be able to handle.
The five online brokers are not, however, the only route to SpaceX shares. Behind the deal stands a syndicate of around 21 banks, through whose brokerage and wealth-management accounts investors can likewise subscribe — including the five US lead underwriters Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Citigroup, JPMorgan, and Bank of America, as well as European houses such as Deutsche Bank, UBS, ING, and Barclays. The roles are divided regionally: according to Bloomberg, Barclays handles orders from the UK, Deutsche Bank and UBS continental Europe, the Royal Bank of Canada the Canadian market, and Mizuho the Asian market. So anyone holding an account at one of these banks can in principle order shares as well.
What matters, though, is who these channels are aimed at. While Robinhood and SoFi target small investors with amounts that are sometimes only in the triple digits (where allocation is by lottery), the syndicate banks mainly work with wealthy private clients, family offices, and private-banking mandates in their home markets. JPMorgan chief Jamie Dimon, for instance, is said to have personally pitched the deal to around 2,500 wealthy clients, and E*Trade reportedly favors the ultra-high-net-worth clientele of parent Morgan Stanley in its internal allocation. So access via the big banks exists — it just tends to run through the upper wealth segment rather than the small-investor account.
Low barriers, a clear message
The entry conditions are designed to entice, too. Fidelity is lowering the minimum investment for SpaceX to 2,000 dollars — far less than the usual 100,000 to 500,000 dollars for sought-after IPOs. Robinhood, SoFi, and E*Trade require no minimum balance in the account at all. Only Schwab remains more demanding, with 100,000 dollars in account assets. Those who sell again too quickly, however, will be reined in: at Fidelity, “flipping” — selling within 15 days — can bar participation in future IPOs.
Behind all of this lies a clear Musk philosophy. As early as 2020 he promised to treat retail investors with “top priority” in a SpaceX listing; at Tesla he is the only chief who takes small investors’ questions first on earnings calls. “Elon’s philosophy is all about broad access, which is why he wants retail involved,” the FT quotes a person familiar with the matter. The calculus has paid off at Tesla so far: there, retail investors hold around 42 percent of the free float and prop up the share price even when growth stalls.
Why the money has to come from the masses
The retail strategy is more than ideology — it is a necessity. A record volume of 75 billion dollars demands a correspondingly broad capital base, especially with OpenAI and Anthropic also lining up two more multibillion-dollar AI IPOs this year that compete for the same institutional money. Retail investors are therefore not just ideological window dressing but a tangible source of demand. IPOs usually draw 5 to 10 percent from retail investors; for SpaceX it is supposed to be 25 to 30 percent.
But this is precisely where the skepticism kicks in. So far only the connectivity business around Starlink is profitable (most recently 1.19 billion dollars in quarterly profit on 10.3 million subscribers), while the rocket division and above all the AI unit xAI are deep in the red. On top of that, average revenue per Starlink user has fallen from about 99 dollars (2023) to around 66 dollars (Q1 2026) — a drop of one third that the prospectus explicitly projects forward. The story SpaceX is selling the market reaches far into the visionary: orbital data centers, cheaper AI compute in space, an “addressable market” of supposedly 28.5 trillion dollars.
Anyone buying should also keep an eye on “Max Q” — that moment of maximum structural stress that Morningstar expects in the months after the IPO, when the 180-day lock-up period for insiders expires around December 2026 and existing shareholders are able to sell. SpaceX itself warns in the prospectus of volatile price swings driven by the high retail participation.
Experts warn of massive overvaluation
As tempting as access is being made — in the run-up to the listing, the voices calling SpaceX massively overvalued are multiplying. With consolidated annual revenue of 18.7 billion dollars (2025) and a GAAP net loss of 4.9 billion dollars, the targeted valuation corresponds to a price-to-sales ratio of around 94 — more than even the hottest private AI startups command, and a multiple of the most expensive publicly listed tech groups.
Morningstar initiated coverage in early June and puts fair value at around 780 billion dollars — less than half the IPO target. Analyst Nicolas Owens calls the company “significantly overvalued” and advises investors to enter after the IPO at cheaper prices instead. His discounted-cash-flow model values the core business of rocket launches and Starlink at around 611 billion dollars, adding a further roughly 170 billion for the AI division on a probability-weighted basis. It is this AI part in particular that is contested: Morningstar does not count xAI’s chatbot Grok among the leading providers, pointing to competition from OpenAI and Anthropic as well as unproven technologies such as orbital data centers. SpaceX received only a “Narrow Moat” rating — a recognized but narrow competitive advantage. In the short term, the stock could nonetheless rise thanks to the small free float and the strong bank syndicates.
The Danish pension fund AkademikerPension (around 25 billion dollars in assets under management) is even more outspoken, having placed SpaceX on an exclusion list and participating in neither the IPO nor the secondary market. Chief investment officer Anders Schelde calls the company “grossly overvalued,” puts the overvaluation at at least 80 percent, and considers a fair value of over a trillion dollars out of the question — the targeted valuation, he says, is “pure fantasy,” driven by Musk’s narrative rather than economic reality. The main reason for the exclusion, however, is governance: Musk is said to hold more than 80 percent of the voting rights while simultaneously serving as CEO, CTO, and chairman of the board. The fund is not alone in this — the chiefs of CalPERS, the New York City Retirement Systems, and the New York State Common Retirement Fund (together more than a trillion dollars) had accused Musk of an “extreme” governance structure.
And finally Michael Burry weighs in, known from “The Big Short” and his bet against the 2008 housing bubble. On his Substack “Cassandra Unchained,” he argues that the IPO filings support neither a one- nor a two-trillion-dollar valuation — any increase rests on “hype and technical factors.” Burry, who most recently disclosed bets against Nvidia and Palantir, also doubts that Anthropic will ever be worth a trillion dollars, and compares the upcoming IPOs of SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic to the TMT stock-market boom of 2000.
For perspective: even Morningstar’s fair value would still amount to roughly 42 times annual revenue. The most expensive member of the “Magnificent 7” by sales multiple — Nvidia, driven by the AI boom — comes in at about 21 times. So SpaceX wants to go public at roughly four and a half times that. It is precisely this gap between vision and fundamentals that retail investors are pricing in when they subscribe via Robinhood, SoFi, or their bank account.
