I've spent 15+ years in startup land.

I built two venture-backed companies and sold them. I raised a $100M solo fund largely through Twitter DMs. I've written checks into dozens of companies, and I've sat on both sides of the table while founders raised money I wasn't invited to put in.

In that time, I’ve had a front-row seat to the single biggest shift in how wealth actually gets built in this country.

The SpaceX IPO is about to make it impossible to ignore.

It's going public at around $1.75 trillion, the largest IPO in history, bigger than Saudi Aramco in 2019. And the headline practically writes itself: buy the stock, own a piece of the future in space and AI.

Last week, I wrote about all of this for USVC investors. But I wanted to write something for my Silly Money readers, because, in my opinion, the headline price is hiding a more interesting story behind it.

Let’s dive in…

For most of modern history, the IPO was the moment you got to play with the big dogs.

Most investors couldn't buy Amazon in a garage in 1994, for example, but you could buy it in 1997 when it listed on NASDAQ, and if you did, you caught an absolutely ridiculous amount of the ride up (and down at times).

That's become the deal most of us have internalized: wait for the IPO, then participate in the next generation of winners in the public markets.

Today, that contract is largely broken.

The most valuable companies of this generation do almost all of their growing up in private now. So by the time you can buy them, the wild part is over.

SpaceX reportedly went from around $350 billion to roughly $1.75 trillion in about eighteen months, and you and I couldn't touch a single dollar of that run up unless we either (a) knew a guy or (b) were an institutional fund.

The IPO isn't the start of the party anymore. It's become the part where they turn the lights on and tell everyone to go home.

And look, this isn't a SpaceX quirk. It's the whole market now.

The median company that went public in 2024 was about 14 years old. Almost double what it was in the mid-90s, and it showed up to its own IPO with roughly triple the revenue.

Companies are doing the hard, fast, exponential part of growing up before you ever get a ticker to type into your brokerage account.

Some of the most valuable companies on the planet (Anthropic, OpenAI, Stripe, Datadog, SpaceX among them), for basically everyone reading this, have been mostly unbuyable for years.

The stretch where a company goes from $10 billion to $300 billion is happening behind a wall, and I've written before about how that wall actually works.

It's got way less to do with your net worth than you'd think, and way more to do with whether you happen to know the right people at the right moment.

I'll just say it plainly: it's fucked.

Not in a conspiracy way, though. Nobody's twirling a mustache in some private chamber.

But the result is the same for almost everyone: the only legal way to get a piece of the most important companies of our era was to wait for an IPO, by which point the people on the inside had already made most of the returns.

Meanwhile a non-accredited investor can buy a leveraged ETF designed to decay, or dump their savings into a meme coin at 2am.

Somehow that's fine for regulators, but early access to the best companies in the world? Too risky for you.

Make it make sense.

I don't bring this up to be cynical about public markets. I bring it up because it might be the single most important thing to understand about investing right now:

More and more of the value is being created in private. And the IPO is the last place you go to catch it.

I couldn't write a whole issue here without the tax implications of this IPO.

The folks who rode SpaceX from early didn't just catch more upside. They likely caught it more tax-efficiently, and that part barely gets talked about.

Value that compounds inside a private company is unrealized. No annual tax drag, no forced selling, no capital gains event until you actually choose to sell.

Compounding without the tax leak is its own quiet form of alpha, and you know I think tax alpha is the most reliable edge there is, more dependable than any stock pick I've ever made.

The truly early ones got an even bigger gift. When a company is still a small C-corp, founders and early employees can hold stock that excludes millions of dollars of gains from tax entirely (QSBS), as long as they hold five-plus years and the company qualified when the shares were issued.

It’s even being reported that the IPO could mint a handful more billionaires and hundreds of new millionaires. Certainly hope they found themselves a great tax advisor!

SpaceX isn't just a rocket company anymore.

It's really three businesses under one roof:

And it may not stop there. In April, SpaceX secured the right to acquire Cursor, one of the fastest-growing AI coding companies in the world, for a reported $60 billion later this year, or to continue its work through a compute partnership instead. If that option is exercised, the software that accelerates improvements on their technical infrastructure could sit under the same roof too.

On their own, each is a serious business. The reason the market may price the combination near $1.75 trillion is the bet that they compound and create vertical efficiency.

The bull case I’ve read goes something like this: The real bottleneck for frontier AI has stopped being algorithms and become physical (aka the compute and the power to run it). SpaceX can provide comparatively-cheap space delivery to unlock the energy and, eventually, compute where it's abundant in space. Starlink is both the network that moves the data and lays the breadcrumb for how SpaceX can build and operate hardware in orbit at scale. xAI brings the models and substantial compute through Collossus. X brings the real-time training data for better AI and distribution layer to reach hundreds of millions of users. And then better AI flows back down the stack, making every launch, satellite, factory, and future model beneath it cheaper to run.

In other words, it's a vertically integrated wager on space, connectivity, and AI at once, three of the most consequential arenas in the economy today, owned by one company, led by a founder who has spent two decades pushing all of them forward at the same time.

Now for the bear case I’ve heard: Whether $1.75 trillion is the right price for SpaceX is a question for the public markets to decide. SpaceX reported a $4.28 billion loss in the first quarter of 2026 and carries more than $41 billion in accumulated losses, according to its S-1. This is likely a company priced on what it might become, not what it earns today, and nearly every business under the roof is enormously capital-hungry.

And the same integration that makes the bull case could also be a risk. This is several moonshots stacked on top of one another, and $1.75 trillion valuation assumes enough of them pay off together. The private valuation ran from $350 billion to $1.75 trillion in eighteen months, and a good portion of that valuation ladder was set in deals between Elon-controlled entities rather than fully at arm's length. Not to mention, leadership could rest on a single founder split across multiple companies, with the occasional political crossfire.

For the last three years, the industry writ large has been starved of exits.

The cash that's supposed to flow back to the people who fund venture funds has instead run negative by roughly $197 billion since 2022, as companies that could have gone public chose to wait.

Funds leaned on a record of secondary share sales last year just to return some capital. In other words, the engine that recycles money into the next generation of startups had largely stalled.

A listing of this size could restart it. When a private position this large finally turns into cash, it returns capital to the funds that backed the company early, which returns capital to their investors, much of which has historically gone right back to funding new companies.

If SpaceX is the first of several large listings this year, the capital flowing back toward early-stage companies could be the most we've seen in nearly a decade.

For a long time my honest answer was: not much.

If you're not a founder and not a fund insider, you indexed the public market and made your peace with the fact that the best private compounding was happening without you.

And indexing is still a perfectly good default, though I'd gently point out the S&P is more concentrated in a handful of mega-caps than it's been in decades, so "diversified" doesn't really mean what it used to.

But the access part has changed recently. A few months ago, I joined USVC as a General Partner. I did it specifically because it's a real attempt to knock that wall down.

It's a registered evergreen fund, built by AngelList, regulated under the Investment Company Act, open to any U.S. investor whether you're accredited or not, starting at $500 instead of the common $250,000-and-a-warm-intro structure of traditional venture funds.

(If this sounds of interest, you can invest today at http://usvc.com/sm btw)

And here's where it loops back to today. Through a position in xAI that converted into the combined company after SpaceX merged with xAI earlier this year, USVC has exposure to SpaceX going into this IPO.

The whole structure of this fund is built to get in before most people can and then have the option to hold through whatever the public market decides, instead of being forced to dump a great company because some fund's ten-year clock ran out.

Ultimately, private markets are risky and illiquid, and this particular IPO is a stack of moonshots priced on what it might become more than what it earns today. Treat it accordingly.

But the bigger point holds no matter what you do with it: the people positioned inside stories like SpaceX were never the ones watching the listing from the outside, refreshing the stock price on day one.

The biggest IPO in history is going to be a hell of a day. But the best opportunities were years ago when it was still private. The real shift worth paying attention to is that, thanks to handful of publicly accessible vehicle, you don't have to be an insider to get there.

Hit reply and tell me where you land on this one. I’ll try to read as many responses as I can.

— Ankur

P.S. If you are interested in USVC, any U.S. investor can get started with as little as $500 at http://usvc.com/sm.

P.P.S. For anyone in the Bay Area, I’m hosting the first in-person event for USVC tomorrow at 6pm PDT. We’ll be joined by Immad Akhund, co-founder and CEO of Mercury, the banking* platform powering hundreds of thousands of startups and small businesses, and one of the more active angel investors in tech.

We’re limited on capacity with only 42 spots left, so submit your request while they still last!

*Mercury is a fintech company, not an FDIC-insured bank. Banking services provided through Choice Financial Group and Column N.A., Members FDIC.

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