A few days ago, The Wall Street Journal published a report 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 decision to bet 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 bet 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 this year. Stories like Darsana 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?

Private secondary markets under "AI anxiety"

Over the past two to 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 on board, but the problem is that none of these companies are publicly listed. For ordinary investors, it’s nearly impossible to find a way to invest before they go public.

Looking at SpaceX’s shareholder list makes it clear: major institutions 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 about $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 squeeze through that $1 billion opening.

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

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

This market specializes in trading shares of private companies. Early investors and employees looking to cash out, along with those who missed the early opportunity seeking to enter, are brought together by platforms, funds, and various intermediaries that make up this market.

Over the past few years, it has expanded 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 pour out.

How many have poured in? According to The New York Times, at least 170 special purpose vehicles, or SPVs, have been created just to purchase shares in SpaceX. An SPV is a shell 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, through collective bulk purchasing, also gained 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 when it was valued at $300 billion.

The problem is that these newly emerged intermediaries vary 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 this 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-popular platform, Linqto, specialized in high-profile assets like SpaceX; it went bankrupt in 2025, and the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission is now investigating whether it properly verified the accredited investor status of its users, affecting over 13,000 investors.

Even if you're not dealing with a scammer, things 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.”

Layered to the fifth level

Back to the 150 podcast listeners from Rich Habits—they didn’t buy SpaceX.

They bought Witz Ventures, and Witz Ventures bought shares in DataPower Capital. It is DataPower 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 shrinks. Independent developer levelsio calculated on social media: suppose you invest $100,000 into SpaceX through three layers of SPVs, with the outermost layer charging a 6% setup fee, and each of the two inner layers taking additional management fees and profit shares—only about $69,000 actually reaches SpaceX’s bottom layer. Before you even start earning, you’ve already lost 30%.

Second, the truth becomes distant. This SPV structure has a致命 flaw: each layer of investors can only see the layer directly above them. If you buy the outermost shell, the shell’s 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 collateral? You can’t see them, and you have no right to check.

170 shells, with up to five layers deep. This is why the Bhatias couldn’t confirm their holdings—not because they weren’t careful, but because the structure was designed from the start to prevent anyone outside the shells 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 4 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 continuously lengthening.

The longer a company stays 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, with multiple layers of intermediaries already built up.

Private elongation 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 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, unicorns valued at over $1 billion have accumulated, with more than 1,500 globally, totaling $6 trillion in value—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 designed specifically to meet this demand have emerged in large numbers.

During the peak of venture capital 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 large 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 shares. Externally, SpaceX exercises its right of first refusal on nearly every share transfer, intercepting sales before they can occur. It conducts share repurchases every six months, buying back shares that employees wish to sell and bringing them under its own control.

The more sealed the door is, the more expensive the tickets at the entrance become.

SpaceX set its own price: in July 2025, it will conduct a share repurchase at a valuation of $400 billion; six months later in December, it doubles to $800 billion. But secondary market quotes have already surged ahead. The Forge platform reflects approximately $1.23 trillion, Hiive shows $1.45 trillion, and the crypto trading platform Hyperliquid has listed contracts implying a valuation above $2 trillion—higher than SpaceX’s own targeted IPO valuation.

There’s another tangle of threads, twisted together through mergers. In March 2025, Musk merged X, formerly Twitter, into his AI company xAI. In February 2026, SpaceX absorbed xAI entirely. Those who had previously purchased Twitter and xAI, along with all the corporate structures behind them, were transferred through two rounds of stock conversions onto SpaceX’s shareholder register.

Open a blind box

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

In May 2026, Anthropic and OpenAI issued public statements explicitly declaring that any share transfers not approved by the board 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 on-chain secondary market specializing in Pre-IPO trading 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, robotics company Figure AI halted secondary trading of its shares amid reports of a $39.5 billion valuation. Among the hottest targets in the private market—Anthropic, SpaceX, Anduril, Stripe, and Databricks—nearly all are doing the same thing: reducing tolerance for secondary trading to zero.

Why are they all turning against each other?

This brings us to an often-overlooked 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 public company. Layered SPVs make it impossible for companies to track exactly how many shareholders they have. Each SPV appears as a single entry on the register, but behind it could be hundreds of individuals. Once a company unknowingly crosses the 2,000-shareholder threshold, it’s 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 driven 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 actually are.

More importantly, there is the issue of 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 sensitive assets. When a company can’t even account for its own shareholders, it cannot clarify who is receiving this information.

Getting rid of countless shareholders, holding the price 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 structures 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, wrote “your shares are invalid” as a public announcement. SpaceX did not issue a similar statement, but its right of first refusal accomplishes essentially the same thing.

The company’s statement of “invalid” left all those layered shells hanging in mid-air. You purchased an SPV and paid the money. 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 share in SpaceX’s SPV is becoming increasingly like opening a blind box.

The time when the box opens is fixed. On June 12, when SpaceX rings the bell on Nasdaq, its filing will for the first time reveal a public, verifiable shareholder register. Every layer of opacity that has surrounded its shares over the past two decades must be accounted for at this moment. If the numbers match, the box contains real shares; if they don’t, it’s just a piece of paper. Bhatia will find out on this day which one he’s 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 artificial liquidity created by AI over the past few years has become so abundant that there’s nowhere left to put it. 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: a blind box that everyone wants to play, yet no one can clearly say what they’ve actually drawn.

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