SpaceX IPO Sparks Wealth Creation and Blind Box Investing in Private Markets

A few days ago, The Wall Street Journal published an article featuring a hedge fund almost no one had heard of called Darsana Capital.

This fund was only established in 2014 and is relatively small. In 2019, it made a bold move: betting on a private rocket company. That year, SpaceX was valued at approximately $30 billion.

Seven years later, SpaceX is going public with a valuation of $1.75 trillion. The approximately $600 million Darsana invested over time is now worth around $15 billion. This single investment is among the most profitable hedge fund trades in Wall Street history, with SpaceX accounting for nearly 60% of Darsana’s total assets.

SpaceX, the largest IPO in history and the first major tech listing of the year. Stories like Darsana’s have been appearing frequently in the news lately. Google invested $900 million in 2015, and it’s now worth hundreds of billions. The $20 million lifeline from Founders Fund in 2008 has grown to $19.5 billion.

But flipping to other reports, the tone changes completely.

At the end of March, Bloomberg and Reuters both reported a strange incident: a group of investors bought shares in SpaceX but couldn’t confirm whether they had actually acquired them. One such investor, entrepreneur Tejpaul Bhatia, believed he held SpaceX stock but was unable to verify whether the shares he was entitled to were legitimate.

On one side, there are wealth-creation stories precise to hundreds of millions; on the other, people who can’t even confirm if they managed to buy in. Same company, same IPO—why such a stark divide?

Over the past two or three years, AI has pushed valuations in the primary market to absurd levels.

Companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, and SpaceX are valued in the hundreds of billions, even trillions of dollars, and their valuations are rising rapidly. Ordinary investors, staring at these numbers, are left with just one thought: I want a piece of this too.

More people than ever want to get in, but the problem is that none of these companies are publicly traded. For average investors, there’s almost no way to buy in before they go public.

Looking at SpaceX’s shareholder list makes it clear: institutional and strategic shareholders hold positions ranging from billions to tens of billions of dollars—Alphabet, Google’s parent company, alone holds over $100 billion. Yet, all publicly available channels combined, including the few ETFs and funds that hold SpaceX, represent a total exposure of approximately $1 billion.

At an estimated valuation of $2 trillion, how much could SpaceX's investors earn?

Moreover, most avenues keep ordinary people out. The majority of private market channels are open only to accredited investors. In the U.S., this means an annual income exceeding $200,000, or net assets of over $1 million excluding the value of one’s primary residence. Those who don’t meet this threshold may not even get a chance to enter that $1 billion opportunity.

Switching to something else would be enough to deter someone due to such a disparity. But the logic of FOMO works in reverse—the more scarce it is, and the more you see others profiting, the more you want to jump in.

The money didn't leave—it flowed into a place called the private secondary market.

This market specializes in trading shares of private companies. Early investors and employees seek to cash out, while those who missed the early opportunity aim to enter, with platforms, funds, and various vehicles facilitating the transactions between them.

Over the past few years, it has grown dramatically. From 2019 to now, its size has tripled. Total trading volume reached approximately $162 billion in 2024, rose to around $23 billion in 2025, and is projected to reach $25 billion in 2026. The number of companies willing to open their shares for secondary trading increased from 12 to 31 within a single year.

Money flows in, and sellers of SpaceX flood out.

How many have poured in? According to The New York Times, at least 170 special purpose vehicles (SPVs) have been created just to purchase shares in SpaceX. An SPV is a shell structure that holds a small stake in SpaceX, and then sells shares of that shell to subsequent investors. One hundred seventy shells, all circling the same company.

These shells all have their own backgrounds.

In October 2025, an institution called Witz Ventures launched an SPV named The Cashmere Fund on the fundraising platform Republic, bundling three of the hottest assets—xAI, SpaceX, and Perplexity—into a single vehicle for retail investors. Approximately 150 listeners of the personal finance podcast Rich Habits collectively pooled their resources to secure access to SpaceX. Rappers 2 Chainz and SkyBridge founder Anthony Scaramucci have both publicly stated that they hold shares in SpaceX.

Retired NBA player Tristan Thompson said on a show that he invested in SpaceX at a $300 billion valuation.

The problem is that these newly emerged intermediaries vary greatly in quality.

An organization called Vika Ventures collected $5.9 million from investors, promising to use the funds to purchase shares in SpaceX. It was later discovered that the founder of the organization used the money to buy luxury watches and private jets. In 2023, another financial intermediary was sentenced to eight years in prison for defrauding more than 50 investors of nearly $6 million by selling pre-IPO shares, including those of SpaceX.

Another once-prominent platform, Linqto, specialized in high-profile assets like SpaceX; it went bankrupt in 2025, and the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission is investigating whether it properly verified investors’ accredited investor status, affecting over 13,000 investors.

Even if you're not dealing with a scammer, the situation may still not be clear.

DataPower Capital is an institution that trades shares in SpaceX. Its founder, David Yakobovitch, told The New York Times that he takes shares for himself but only accepts transactions that are one layer removed from SpaceX. “A few layers down,” he said, “things start to get murky.”

Back to those 150 podcast listeners of Rich Habits—they didn’t buy SpaceX.

They purchased Witz Ventures, and Witz Ventures purchased shares in DataPower Capital. DataPower is the entity that directly acquired shares from SpaceX’s registered shareholders. In other words, an ordinary person who placed an order after listening to a podcast is at least two to three layers removed from actual SpaceX stock.

With each additional layer, two things happen simultaneously.

First, your money decreases. Independent developer levelsio calculated on social media: suppose you invest $100,000 into SpaceX through three layers of SPVs—the outermost layer charges a 6% setup fee, and each of the two inner layers additionally takes management fees and performance fees. The actual amount reaching SpaceX’s underlying entity is reduced to approximately $69,000. Before any returns are generated, you’ve already lost 30%.

Second, the truth becomes distant. This SPV structure has a critical flaw: each layer of investors can only see the layer directly above them. If you purchase the outermost shell, its manager tells you it holds the next shell beneath it. But is that next shell real? And below that, are there actually SpaceX shares as underlying assets? You cannot see them, nor do you have the right to investigate.

170 shells, with up to five layers deep. This is why the Bhatias cannot confirm their holdings—not because they weren’t careful, but because the structure was intentionally designed to prevent outsiders from seeing inside.

Why can SpaceX's nesting dolls be nested so deeply?

It depends on how long it stayed in the private market. It was founded in 2002 and went public in 2026, remaining private for a full 24 years.

What does 24 years mean? The tech companies that went public in 1999 had an average age of just four years. Those from 2014 averaged 11 years. In recent years, the median age of U.S. companies going public has risen to 14 years. At 24 years, SpaceX is another extreme on a curve that has been steadily lengthening.

The longer a company remains in the private market, the longer its shares are repeatedly traded, transferred, and layered with intermediaries. SpaceX’s shares have been trading over-the-counter for more than two decades, accumulating multiple layers of intermediaries along the way.

The extension of private ownership is not just SpaceX's issue.

Over the years, the median age of U.S. companies going public has risen from 6 years in 1980 to 13.5 years in 2024. The reason is straightforward: there is simply too much money in the private markets.

As of 2023, venture capitalists across the globe still have over $650 billion in uninvested capital. With companies not lacking funding, there’s no rush to go public and face the reporting pressures and regulatory scrutiny of public markets. As a result, the number of unicorns—companies valued at over $1 billion—has continued to grow, reaching more than 1,500 globally with a combined valuation of $6 trillion, most of which haven’t raised funds at a public valuation in over three years.

The longer a company stays in the private market, the longer the shares held by employees and early investors remain locked. For these individuals seeking liquidity, the secondary market is the only outlet. With demand accumulating, SPVs specifically designed to meet this demand have emerged in large numbers.

At the peak of venture capital investment in 2021, the number of newly established SPVs in the U.S. increased by 235% year-over-year. By the third quarter of 2024, there were already over 2,400 identifiable, actively operating SPVs. When a tool is used on such a massive scale and repeatedly over two decades, it is almost inevitable that it will be layered five levels deep.

SpaceX is also the most tightly controlled company in the private market when it comes to stock. Externally, SpaceX exercises its right of first refusal on nearly every share transfer, intercepting potential sales before they occur. It conducts share repurchases twice a year, acquiring shares that employees wish to sell and bringing them under its own control.

The more sealed the door is, the higher the price of tickets at the entrance.

SpaceX set its own price: a share repurchase in July 2025 at a valuation of $400 billion; six months later in December, it doubled to $800 billion. However, secondary market quotes have already surged ahead. On the Forge platform, the valuation is around $1.23 trillion; on Hiive, it’s $1.45 trillion; and on the crypto trading platform Hyperliquid, contracts are listed at valuations exceeding $2 trillion—higher than SpaceX’s own targeted IPO valuation.

There’s an even more tangled mess that resulted from these mergers. In March 2025, Musk merged X, formerly Twitter, into his AI company xAI. In February 2026, SpaceX then fully absorbed xAI. Those who had previously purchased Twitter and xAI, along with all the corporate structures behind them, were transferred through two rounds of stock conversions and now appear on SpaceX’s shareholder register.

At this point, even the company can't sit idly by.

In May 2026, Anthropic and OpenAI issued public statements explicitly declaring that any share transfers not approved by the board of directors would be invalid and would not be recorded on the companies’ books. Both companies named eight platforms, including Forge and Hiive, as unauthorized. Upon the announcement, related tokenized assets on the pre-IPO on-chain secondary market plummeted, losing 30% to 40% within a single day.

This announcement regarding secondary market trading is not an impulsive decision by just one or two companies.

Recently, when robotics company Figure AI was reported to have a $39.5 billion valuation, it also stepped in to block secondary trading of its own shares. Among the hottest targets in the private market—Anthropic, SpaceX, Anduril, Stripe, and Databricks—nearly all are doing the same thing: reducing their tolerance for secondary trading to zero.

Why did they all turn against each other?

This brings us to a little-known listing “red line.” Under U.S. rules, any company with more than 2,000 shareholders—even if it hasn’t gone public—must disclose financial information regularly, just like a publicly traded company. Layered SPVs make it impossible for companies to track their actual number of shareholders. Each SPV appears as a single entry on the register, yet may conceal hundreds of individuals behind it. Once a company unknowingly crosses the 2,000-shareholder threshold, it is forced to open its books.

Another reason is the pricing of stock options granted to employees. If the company’s shares are freely traded on the secondary market and bid up to high prices, the company cannot ignore that price when setting the exercise price for employee options. The more speculative the secondary market becomes, the less valuable the options held by employees effectively are.

More importantly, there is the information. Shareholders have a legal right to access the company’s operational data. For an AI company, model architecture, training data, and computing resource allocation are its most critical proprietary assets. When a company can’t even account for its own shareholders, it cannot possibly know who is receiving this information.

Getting rid of countless shareholders, preserving the pricing of options, and sealing off information—individually, none of these actions are new. But when the secondary market expanded to $230 billion and layers of nested arrangements reached five levels deep, companies realized they could no longer contain the situation through private measures alone. So they stepped into the spotlight and, for the first time, formally announced in public notices: “Your shares are invalid.” SpaceX did not issue a similar statement, but its right of first refusal effectively accomplishes the same thing.

The company’s statement of “invalid” left all those layered shell structures hanging in mid-air. You purchased an SPV and paid the money—but until the company publicly reconciles its accounts, no one can tell you whether the underlying SpaceX shares were ever approved or are even valid.

Buying a SpaceX SPV is increasingly like opening a blind box.

The time when the box will be opened is fixed. On June 12, when SpaceX rings the NASDAQ bell, its filing will for the first time reveal a public, verifiable shareholder register. Every layer of secrecy that has shrouded its shares over the past two decades must be accounted for at this moment. If the records match, the box contains real shares; if they don’t, it’s just a piece of paper. On this day, Bhatia will find out which one he has drawn.

But after SpaceX, there’s OpenAI, Anthropic, and a long list of other names. Scroll through your social media feed for a few seconds, and you’ll see “proxy investment” posts for these hottest AI companies.

The flood of hot money generated by AI in recent years has nowhere to go. There are only a few truly worthy assets, and they’re all tightly locked up. With too much money and too few openings, countless intermediaries have sprung up in between.

As long as this imbalance persists, the private secondary market will remain as it is today: a blind box that everyone wants to play, yet no one can clearly say what they’ve actually drawn.