There are moments in investing where the market gets genuinely interesting.
Not just because prices are moving, but because a single event tells you a lot about where investor psychology is.
The SpaceX IPO might be one of those moments.
This could become the biggest IPO in history. The numbers being discussed are enormous. A valuation somewhere around $1.75 trillion. A potential raise of around $75 billion. A company that could instantly become one of the largest listed businesses in the world.
And of course, because it is Elon Musk, the hype is already everywhere.
SpaceX is not just being sold as a rocket company. That is probably the first thing investors need to understand. This is not simply a business that launches things into space. SpaceX now includes Starlink, satellite internet, AI ambitions, data centre ideas, space infrastructure, and the wider Elon Musk ecosystem.
That makes the story exciting.
It also makes it very hard to value.
This is where investors need to slow down a little bit.
Because when you strip away the hype, the valuation is aggressive. Extremely aggressive. Based on the numbers discussed in the filings and commentary around the IPO, SpaceX is being valued at a level that makes even some expensive technology stocks look fairly normal.
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That does not automatically mean it will be a bad investment. Some companies look expensive for years and still go on to dominate. Tesla is the obvious example people will point to. Amazon looked expensive many times. Nvidia looked expensive before it became even more expensive.
But the danger with IPOs is that people often confuse a brilliant company with a brilliant price.
I have seen this plenty of times in crypto as well. A new launch gets hyped for weeks, everyone starts talking about how early it is, how big the opportunity could be, and how this is the one people cannot afford to miss.
Then the asset launches, early buyers and insiders finally get their liquidity, and retail investors end up buying the excitement just as others are selling into it. Not every launch works like that, of course, but I have learned the hard way that when something feels too good to be true, it often is. Hype can be powerful, but it can also be used as the exit door for someone else.
