Small investors scrambled to get in on the SpaceX IPO, even as some believe the valuation is ‘stupid’
Marvin Jung does not believe SpaceX because he thinks it’s a bargain.
The 51-year-old veterinary care operations regional manager believes Elon Musk’s rocket company will go public at a “really, really aggressive” valuation. But he still demanded 1,000 shares. robinhoodBetting enthusiasm for one of the world’s most anticipated IPOs will drown out price concerns.
SpaceX set a fixed price of $135 per share ahead of Friday’s IPO and pegged its valuation at $1.77 trillion. This would make SpaceX the seventh-largest company in the United States by market value. Tesla’s equal.
“It’s outrageous. It’s stupid. It’s unreasonable, to be honest,” Jung said of the valuation.
That hasn’t stopped him from trying to get allocations, especially given that SpaceX is directing an unusually large amount of shares to retail. Retail allocation is in the low 20% range. Although this is below the 30% previously expected, it’s still a much larger cut than usual given that most IPOs offer only 5% to 10% to retail. Loyalty.
Investors can request access to IPO shares through various brokerage platforms, including Fidelity, which sets the brokerage account balance minimum for investors at $2,000.
That’s significantly lower than the $100,000 to $500,000 threshold Fidelity sets for IPOs, according to a source familiar with the matter.
A self-directed investor who trades in his spare time, Jung was active during the meme stock boom and keeps a close eye on the markets via Reddit investing forums. His plan is not to become a long-term SpaceX shareholder. Instead, it hopes to capitalize on what it expects to be a strong first-day rally and then move on.
“What SpaceX and Elon are doing is like a beautiful symphony of all the right trigger meme words,” he said. “I think this has the potential to come out strongly on day one. I’m going to predict at least 30%.”
Jung said he plans to sell shortly after trading begins. He wants to free up capital for Anthropic and OpenAI, which he sees as the next wave of blockbuster offerings.
Investors need to be careful as retail brokerage firms have anti-flip policies to penalize traders who exit too early. For example, Fidelity notes that if a trader sells their allocation within the first 15 calendar days, their ability to participate in future IPOs will be affected.
“Time to go. Thank you, Elon. I spent a lot of money on my wife’s Tesla. I need some of it back,” he said, laughing.
Not betting against Elon
Since Elon Musk founded SpaceX in 2002, the company has grown into a conglomerate that includes not only reusable rockets but also satellite internet service Starlink and xAI. Musk’s net worth may increase with his IPO Get over $1 trillion.
“Elon gets that premium multiple because he has a vision of what’s going to happen in the future,” said Michael Monaghan, portfolio manager at Founder ETFs, which tracks 100 actively managed, U.S.-listed companies. Founders 100 ETF (FFF). “He’s building this faster than anyone else,” he continued, later adding: “You can’t model this in a traditional valuation framework.”
These remarks come after SpaceX struck major computing deals with Anthropic and Google in recent weeks. Anthropic agreed to pay the company $1.25 billion per month until May 2029, while Google committed to giving SpaceX $920 million per month for 32 months.
SpaceX, Tesla and Trump was inaugurated for his second non-consecutive term as the 47th president of the United States.
Kevin Lamarque | Afp | Getty Images
With the addition of the Google deal announced during SpaceX’s roadshow last week, the company more than doubled its 2026 revenue forecasts, Monaghan said.
“I’ve never seen anything like it,” he continued. The portfolio manager estimates that SpaceX could reach $200 billion in revenue by 2030, and he thinks that estimate is “conservative.”
For all the optimism about the IPO and the possibility that Musk could become the world’s first trillionaire, retail investor Mikey Moran, like other investors, is afraid of missing out. Moran is no stranger to riding a wave of excitement: He bought 10,000 shares in July 2025. Open Door Technologies. The stock rose nearly 79% over the next two days.
“This is the Super Bowl of IPOs,” he said of SpaceX.
Moran, the 49-year-old hair extension and beauty supply company founder, eventually received 11 of the 20 shares he requested through Robinhood, though he said he was “undecided on whether it was a good trade.” According to him, this will be more of a short-term investment rather than a long-term holding; Moran said he was willing to take “some risk” despite concerns about the company’s valuation.
“How could you not want to be part of the biggest one?” he added.
Moran revealed that leaving Tesla too early years ago was one of the biggest business mistakes he ever made. In 2018, the trader bought the stock and held it for only a few weeks; He thought he should quit while he was ahead and make some profits while the stock was rising. Little did he know that Tesla shares would continue to rise in the coming years. Since the beginning of 2018, the stock has risen more than 1,700 percent, reaching a value of $1.5 trillion.
TSLA shares since the beginning of 2018
This time, the Atlanta-based entrepreneur said Musk was the main reason he wanted to get into the business, describing him as someone who “makes it happen.”
“No matter what he does, it’s hard to bet against Elon Musk,” Moran told CNBC. “It’s really hard to argue with that. [Musk] He’s not the greatest entrepreneur of all time.”
Andrew Chen learned the hard way not to bet against Elon Musk.
The 21-year-old Cornell University student, who studied finance and computer science and also traded stocks, once invested in airline connectivity companies that many investors believed would be uncompetitive. Instead, they were interrupted by SpaceX’s Starlink satellite internet network.
“I had been using a lot of these names for a long time, and in the end I was completely wrong because Elon was able to deliver,” Chen said. “I was wrong before I bet against Elon, and I don’t think he’ll be wrong when it comes to execution in the space, obviously he’s been extremely successful.”
Now, as SpaceX prepares for its highly anticipated public debut, Chen is taking the opposite side of the trade. He requested five shares through Robinhood and plans to hold on to them despite concerns from some investors that the company’s valuation is stretched.
“From a corporate finance and fundamentals perspective, there is no way you can get to a $1.7 trillion market cap,” he said. “This depends a lot on future executions.”
But for Chen, the real issue is this uncertainty. Having watched Musk overcome skepticism from both investors and competitors time and time again, Musk is ready to place another bet on the entrepreneur’s ability to deliver results.
“I think being able to buy stock right now is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity,” he said.
looking beyond
SpaceX was one of the most discussed names on Reddit’s WallStreetBets forum in the days leading up to its IPO, with more than 1,600 mentions since Monday, according to Breakout Point.
Despite all the rumors, 41-year-old Ross Cameron still isn’t fully convinced there’s demand. Cameron, who lives in the Berkshires of Massachusetts, founded the Warrior Treading trading education platform more than a decade ago, and his YouTube channel has more than 2 million subscribers. He requested 2,500 shares from Charles Schwab and emphasized that his decision on whether to move forward with investment in SpaceX’s IPO would depend on how much they gave him.
“If they say, ‘We got them, you can have them all,’ I’ll say, ‘No, thank you,’ because that will tell me the supply is plentiful,” he said. “If they say, ‘We can only buy you 1,000 or 2,000 shares,’ I’ll probably buy them because that tells me there’s a lot of demand, which indicates that the IPO will open higher and we’ll still see more demand.”
If he were to invest, it wouldn’t take long to get out anyway. He’s already skeptical about the IPO price: “We’re buying at the highest price it’s ever traded at, and that defines stupid money.” With the retail allocation being the “biggest wild card,” he believes he will have a better chance of getting a “good” risk-reward ratio after evaluating the stock’s movement over six months, and The lockout period has expired.
“My thinking on SpaceX is to trade it and not get married yet, give it a chance to sell, let the insiders cash out and then see where it finds support,” Cameron said. “Then maybe there’s something to work on.”
Helaine Markham sees opportunities beyond this point. Markham, who is 30 and lives in Monterey Bay, California, runs Markham Trading, a market education platform, with her husband, Blane Markham. While he thinks the short-term growth opportunity lies with Starlink, there’s another part of the company that excites him.
As seen from Canaveral National Seashore, a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket carrying 60 Starlink satellites launches from pad 39A at the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, on October 6, 2020. This is the 13th group of satellites put into orbit by SpaceX as part of a constellation designed to provide broadband internet service around the world. (Photo: Paul Hennessy/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
Nurfoto | Nurfoto | Getty Images
“The long-term growth opportunity is the space-related side of the business,” Markham said. “The potential to be in space-related industries that don’t exist yet, such as mining from space, and also the potential [artificial intelligence] data centers in space.”
Although Markham only requested two shares through Robinhood, he wants to gradually increase his holdings.
“I really hope to hold this for the long term, over the next 10 years, to realize the full long-term growth opportunity at hand,” he said. “Over time, it could become a legacy investment that will be passed on to my children.”
He may be on to something, given the growing interest in the space among investors. Maurits Pot, CEO of Tema ETFs, sees it as inevitable that there will be multiple space-related components in the S&P 500 by 2030.
Pot runs the world’s largest space-themed ETF. Tema Space Innovators ETF (NASA)It debuted at the end of March. The fund has approximately $2.6 billion in assets under management and will be the only space ETF to directly own approximately 7% of SpaceX’s net asset value. Quarter to date, the ETF is up nearly 40%.
NASA shares are up quarter-to-date
The CEO emphasized that the fund is not a way to trade SpaceX. He also doesn’t see SpaceX’s IPO as an effective opportunity to turn the stock around.
“If people are invested in the space economy, trading in SpaceX’s IPO might seem a little silly,” Pot said.
“The space economy will only grow,” he said. “SpaceX IPO is not the goal.”
SpaceX did not respond to CNBC’s request for comment on valuation concerns.
— CNBC’s Charlotte Morabito and Alex Harring contributed reporting.
