Access to the Exit
They are finally letting people like me buy in. The trouble is what we are being let into.
On Friday, for the first time, a person like me will be allowed to own a piece of SpaceX. Same price the big funds pay. One hundred thirty-five dollars a share, fixed on the cover of the prospectus, offered through Robinhood and Fidelity and Schwab to anyone with an account and the nerve. After fifteen years of watching from the curb, the door is open. The word everyone is using is democratization.
I have followed SpaceX since 2012, and I have wanted to own a piece of it for nearly as long. I know what I would be buying, and I want it anyway. The pull is real, and it has had more than a decade to compound.
The hard thing is that the same price is not the same deal. And the door they opened does not lead where the money is. It leads to the exit.
What you are actually buying
Start with what is in the box, because most people think they know and they are wrong. The ticker says SPCX and your mind says rockets. The filing says something else. SpaceX absorbed xAI in February and folded in X, the former Twitter, through xAI’s 2025 acquisition, and the company now reports in three segments: Space, Connectivity, and AI. The AI segment, the prospectus says plainly, “includes our AI compute, Grok, and X.” You are not buying a rocket company. You are buying Elon Musk’s empire entire: rockets and satellites, a frontier AI lab, a chatbot, and a social network, folded into one ticker. I find that bundle more interesting, not less. The part worth pausing on is not what is in the box but how it is priced. One number, $135, fixed on the cover with no range and no decimal of doubt, for the whole sprawling thing at once. The company set the price. You take it or leave it.
It is good that this is happening. I mean that. A private company answers to no one but its insiders; a public one files a prospectus, opens its books, submits to quarterly daylight. Liquidity, disclosure, price discovery, a wider circle of owners: these are features of a healthier system, not a sicker one. I am not against the IPO. I am against the story being told about it.
The pop belongs to the people who already won
Here is the part the excitement is built to obscure. The first-day jump that everyone is waiting for, the pop, does not go to you. It goes to whoever was handed shares at the offer price the night before, and that is overwhelmingly institutions. Across forty-five years of American IPOs, the average first-day return is about 19 percent, and the total value handed to those allocated buyers, the money the issuing company left on the table, runs to roughly a quarter of a trillion dollars. The retail investor does not catch the pop. The retail investor buys after it, at the popped price, which means buying “at the open” and buying “at $135” are usually not the same trade at all. You pay the spike the early holders are selling into.
And they are set up to sell. SpaceX’s lockup is not a flat wall; it is a staircase. Most insider shares free up in waves over the first six months, with an early release triggered the moment the stock trades 30 percent above the offer for five of ten days. The demand you create at the open is the liquidity their early exit requires.
Then the long arc. Hot debuts are not blessed with smooth climbs. The median IPO is down roughly a quarter from its first-day close three years later, and better than a third of them lose more than half their value over that span. A few rockets, Tesla among them, carry the average for everyone. That is the trajectory I have to assume SpaceX rides until it proves otherwise, and a believer who has waited this long can afford to wait for the proof. I will not be buying on Friday. The open is priced for the people leaving, not the people arriving.
None of that is fraud. There is no conspiracy in any of it. It is the ordinary architecture of a public offering, scaled to the largest one in history and dressed in the language of access. We mistake proximity to a famous name for a share in its fortune. They are not the same. Wall Street selling you the position it is trying to exit is not new; it is the oldest move there is, the one I traced in Pushing Their Book.
The door that was closed when it mattered
But the day-one pop is the small injustice. The large one is upstream.
By the end of this week the wealthiest man on earth will be wealthier still, and the people nearest him wealthier with him. I do not resent a dollar of it. I believe in the system that made it possible. Risk taken early and carried for years is how capital is supposed to work, and it is supposed to pay. My complaint is narrower, and it is not about them. It is about who was allowed near the upside at all.
The wealth in SpaceX was not made on Friday. It was made over thirteen years, in private rounds, by people the law let into the room. Google put money in at a twelve-billion-dollar valuation in 2015; on Friday that stake is worth on the order of a hundred times what they paid. Thousands of employees will wake up millionaires. That is the real return, the venture return, the 50x and the 100x, and it was earned in exactly the years an ordinary person who believed in this company was forbidden from participating.
Ten thousand dollars in SpaceX a decade ago, at the valuation Google bought into, would be worth around a million and a half at Friday’s price. For the buyer at Friday’s price to make that same return, SpaceX would have to grow into a company worth more than $250 trillion, over twice the value of every public company on Earth combined. That return is not unfair. It is gone, claimed in full by the people who were allowed to claim it. What the new buyer inherits is a good stock’s return, not a venture lottery’s, and no test of skill or nerve conjures the difference back.
Forbidden is the right word. To invest in a private company in America you must be an “accredited investor,” and to be accredited you must have a net worth over a million dollars excluding your home, or an income above two hundred thousand dollars a year, three hundred thousand with a spouse. Those numbers have sat unchanged for more than a decade, the income figures longer still, never once indexed to inflation. They are not a test of whether you understand a balance sheet or a cap table or the risk of a launch failure. They are a test of whether you are already rich.
A pastor married to a nurse is not rich. We manage our money carefully, we have followed these companies for years, we understand exactly how likely a moonshot is to crater. None of it counts. The rule does not measure whether you understand risk. It measures whether you can afford to be wrong. The law treats those as the same thing, and they are not.
There is an old name for what this produces. Sociologists call it the Matthew effect, after the line in the parable of the talents: “For to everyone who has, more will be given, and he will have abundance; but from him who does not have, even what he has will be taken away” (Matthew 25:29). Advantage compounds. The people allowed into the rooms where value is created get richer from being allowed in; the people kept out are invited only once the value is made and the insiders need somewhere to sell. We have written that dynamic into securities law and called it protection. It is the same sleight of hand I described in Clean Outside the Cup: a thing that operates as concentration, marketed as its opposite.
The test we already wrote and refused to use
Here is what undoes the protection argument. We already know how to measure sophistication directly, without a wealth screen, and we already do it, quietly, for almost no one.
Since 2020 there has been a so-called competence path: hold a Series 65 license and you qualify as accredited, no million dollars required. I had not heard of it until this week, and once I looked, I understood why it had never mattered. It is not a door for someone like me. Passing the exam is not enough. To qualify you have to register and keep an active license in good standing, which in practice means affiliating with a registered advisory firm and taking on the obligations of a working financial professional. I do not want to advise anyone. I do not want to manage other people’s money. I want to be allowed to put my own money into a company I believe in, a Series A startup if I choose, and to carry that risk with my eyes open. The only competence door we built makes you join the industry to walk through it. That is not access. It is a guild.
And the clean version, the one that would let you simply take an exam and prove you understand the risk, is not hypothetical. The House passed it in June 2025, 397 to 12, a margin you almost never see on anything. It would let people qualify by demonstrated knowledge and index those frozen 2010 thresholds to inflation. It has sat in a Senate committee for a year. The fix is written. It is bipartisan to the point of near-unanimity. What is missing is the will to let you in.
The obvious objection is fair. Open the private markets to everyone and you do not just democratize the upside, you democratize the risk, and most early bets are zeros, not hundredfold winners. I am not asking for a guaranteed seat on the rocket. I am asking for the right to choose the risk as an adult who can demonstrate he understands it. Replace a test of wealth with a test of competence. That is not recklessness. It is the opposite of the current rule, which lets a lottery winner with no financial literacy buy every private deal in town while a disciplined saver who has done the homework is told he needs protecting from himself.
Where the locked-out money actually went
If you want to see what happens when you tell a generation it is too unsophisticated for regulated risk, look at where they put their money instead.
They went to crypto. Not because it was safe, and not because it was wise, but because it was the one high-risk, high-upside frontier with no doorman checking your net worth. A market with worse disclosure than any SpaceX seed round, more volatility, more outright fraud, and it was open. The same people the law barred from a vetted private placement could buy a meme coin at two in the morning with a debit card. We locked the front door marked “regulated, disclosed, accredited only” and acted surprised when the crowd climbed through the window marked “anything goes.” Then we called them reckless. The recklessness was the design.
I was one of them. I did not lose money, because I did what I always do: researched, bought only what I understood, and risked only what I could afford to lose. The discipline the rule assumed I lacked is the discipline that kept me whole. A net-worth minimum would not have taught me that. It would only have kept me out of the better-disclosed version of the same bet.
What I will do, and what it says
So I will not buy SpaceX on Friday. I have owned Tesla for years and held it through every drawdown that tried to shake me out, so this is not caution born of fear of the upside. I know what catching one of these actually feels like. That is exactly why I trust myself to wait for the right price instead of the loud one. I will let the excitement settle, watch the lockups come off, and decide later whether the company I have admired for thirteen years is a business I want to own at a price that makes sense, somewhere south of the roughly $1.75 trillion this offering implies and the $780 billion a sober analyst like Morningstar puts on it. I will do the same with Anthropic, which filed its own paperwork this month, and with OpenAI, with less appetite, behind it. This is a pattern now, not a single event, and the question of who gets to own the future before it is finished being built is the same one underneath You’ll Own Nothing.
Here is the wager, and you can hold me to it. The Friday pop is the boring part. SPCX almost certainly opens above $135, because that is what hot IPOs do, and the people selling you that open are the ones who made their money in the rooms you were never allowed to enter. The real test comes near ninety days, when the first insider lockups release and the pop money has gone home. Around 60 percent of IPOs decline around their lockup windows, and SpaceX wrote its lockups to start freeing insiders as early as day seventy. I would not be surprised to see SPCX above its offer this week. I would be surprised to see it there in ninety days. I will mark the easy half on Saturday and come back for the rest.
The deeper thing is not about one stock. A market that sells you “access” as the product, while reserving the part where the value is actually created, is telling you what it thinks you are for. You are not the investor it was built to enrich. You are the liquidity it needs at the end. Access to the exit is not a share in the work.
I would settle for being treated as an adult. Let the disciplined and the studied and the not-yet-rich prove what we know and carry the risk we choose. The door is not too dangerous to open. It is too profitable, for the people already inside, to leave unlocked.
Sources
SpaceX (Space Exploration Technologies Corp.), Form S-1/A registration statement, filed 2026-06-03, U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1181412/000162828026040364/spaceexplorationtechnologib.htm
Reuters, “SpaceX plans to raise $75 billion in IPO at $135 per share, source says,” 2026-06-03, https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/spacex-plans-raise-75-billion-ipo-135-per-share-source-says-2026-06-03/
Jay R. Ritter, “Initial Public Offerings: Updated Statistics,” University of Florida (IPO Data), https://site.warrington.ufl.edu/ritter/ipo-data/
Morningstar, “SpaceX: What Investors Need to Know About Its Enormous Upcoming IPO,” https://www.morningstar.com/stocks/spacex-what-investors-need-know-about-its-enormous-upcoming-ipo
Morrison Foerster (Free Writings & Perspectives), “IPO Lockups and Stock Price Declines,” https://www.freewritings.law/2018/07/ipo-lockups-stock-price-declines/
U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission / Investor.gov, “Accredited Investors – Updated Investor Bulletin,” https://www.investor.gov/introduction-investing/general-resources/news-alerts/alerts-bulletins/investor-bulletins/updated-3
U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, “Amendments to the Accredited Investor Definition” (compliance guide; August 26, 2020 order adding the Series 7/65/82 credential path), https://www.sec.gov/resources-small-businesses/small-business-compliance-guides/amendments-accredited-investor-definition
FINRA, “Series 65 – Uniform Investment Adviser Law Exam,” https://www.finra.org/registration-exams-ce/qualification-exams/series65
H.R. 3394, Fair Investment Opportunities for Professional Experts Act, 119th Congress (passed House 397-12, June 23, 2025; referred to Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs), https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/3394
The Holy Bible, New King James Version. Matthew 25:29 (the Parable of the Talents).
Miles DeBenedictis, Pushing Their Book, https://pastormiles.substack.com/p/pushing-their-book
Miles DeBenedictis, Clean Outside the Cup, https://pastormiles.substack.com/p/clean-outside-the-cup
Miles DeBenedictis, You’ll Own Nothing, https://pastormiles.substack.com/p/youll-own-nothing
This article was developed using AI writing tools I built to work with my voice, research, and editorial framework. The ideas, arguments, and positions are mine. The pipeline that helps me draft, evaluate, and refine them is something I created as part of my work at Nomion AI. I believe in building with AI and being honest about it. If you want to know more about that process, ask me.