Not advice. Not a discouragement. An opinion. Shoot holes at it if you want.
To invest or not invest. Timing.
What is the most relevant question today?
That is where we should start because the framing matters. The breathless coverage, the roadshow, the 21 banks, the ticker symbol SPCX going live on Nasdaq on June 12, the $1.75 trillion valuation, the $75 billion raise that would make it the largest IPO in stock market history — all of it conspires to make the question feel urgent. Binary. You are either in, or you are a fool who missed it.
But the more honest question is not about timing. It is about what is actually being produced anymore, when in fact nothing is being produced anymore. Not in the sense that matters. We are deep in the financialisation of everything, where the structure of the deal has become the product, and the IPO is no longer primarily an instrument of capital formation. It is an exit. Dressed up, very expensively, as an opportunity.
The IPO of the past is not the IPO of now.
The general idea, historical, textbook, and practical, is that the purpose of an IPO for the vast majority of companies was and is about raising funds for the business. That was the point. Capital to build, to hire, to scale, to do the thing the company was formed to do.
There are other considerations, of course, and there are bundled interests by several parties — including governments, investors, founders, and employees — but the primary goal is to raise funds for the business.
What has changed is not the structure. What has changed is the scale and depth of the financialisation of the IPO, and the proportion of interests that is not about partaking in the growth and operation of a business but in the exit of investors and founders. That is what an IPO has quietly become, at least at this scale and in this era.
This is not a zero-sum game but if you are a retail investor caught up in enthusiasm, with FOMO, we do not advise or deter specific actions. But do understand the fact that the vast majority of money that will be extracted from the market and into the pockets of founders will be coming from the likes of ordinary citizens like you.
The frenzy benefits the lucky that are already there.
Imagine you are beside a lake or a river, or a pond, with fish and other creatures like ducks and swans. Along this stretch, along this coast, at some random point, a good elderly stranger brings forth loaves of bread. Not leftovers, but just goodwill and kindness for gentle creatures.
From an ecosystem perspective, who gets fed? Who benefits from this? Who wastes energy? And, finally, who won’t be bothered?
It is all about being at the right place at the right time. Or being in the wrong place at the wrong time, when crumbs of bread start being cast into the water.
No difference from a startup or an upstart. A large part of money, early on, will benefit those who are already in place and in time will benefit when the frenzy begins. Of course, there will be those who get more or less; the bigger you are, the more influential you become. Or probably, you are just in the periphery, and you have the skill to partake, but you were simply not close enough to take action.
And then there will be those creatures who will be at the wrong place at the wrong time. This is the IPO. These are retail investors. Waste time, waste energy, FOMO to get into the fray — invest resources and gain nothing, or partake in the frenzy and get gobbled up by the bigger powers. Bottom line: net loss for you.
This is the typical IPO scenario. Do understand this is the mode for each of you.
Finally, those in bliss — blissfully unaware — just carry on with their lives. They probably escape altogether. But life goes on.
Just understand: the IPO is not a pure exercise in raising funds. Before, this was the predominant reason why. But for the controversial ones — the ones of this scale, of this moment — it is about the exit. And this will come for you, so watch out.
Hype curve. Long.
The time to invest in a company, although you cannot time it, actually, is with conviction, through private markets, or through lucky proximity, where early means a few months, a few years. And then, if you have enough resources, the girth, if you are one who can join the frenzy and overpower or outpace others, like a shark joining the frenzy, the intensity of the shark, even late in the game, will win.
Probably during the peak of the frenzy and just afterwards — whether people are exiting or exercising their options — that is where the real game is played.
If you are a normal creature at the right place, right time, invest with conviction after the option. Dilute early on, or invest afterwards, when the dust settles. To invest in what’s left. Hopefully, instead of investing in a frenzy, you invest in a business and an ecosystem — whether for the short term or the long term, in the future.
Adding insult to the injury.
If it’s any consolation, we all know that logically, even taking into consideration the general irrationality of markets, investing or joining during an IPO, as outlined above, is already unnatural. Or naturally unwise.
You join an IPO, you invest in an IPO, for relatively bigger gains. And yes, yes, yes — from different schools of thought: value-based, growth-based, FOMO-based — this is not the only consideration. But it does not make sense to invest in an already inflated stock. Not given all the preceding arguments.
SpaceX is targeting a $2 trillion valuation. The roadshow kicked off this week, demand is reportedly strong, and the listing is days away. Starlink alone accounts for an estimated 58% of SpaceX’s total revenue. The valuation prices in not just what the company is today, but everything it might ever become — satellite internet dominance, space-based data infrastructure, interplanetary ambition — all of it, now, before any of it has fully arrived. History says IPO stocks pop an average of 30% on their first day of trading. History also has things to say about what follows.
So there you have it. Not advice, not a discouragement. This is probably an opinion you can shoot holes at. But, linking back to the first three arguments for this:
The harsh but simple hard truth.
We have probably reached a point of exhausting all options in all these frenzies. The only remaining beneficial action, for one’s own sanity and health and wider society, is to perhaps consider just walking away from all of it.
You can delete your social media account. You can call, or text, or meet your family in a different way. There are other apps you can use. You don’t need three billion apps to connect with three billion people. You don’t need to know what is happening with other people’s lives. You only need to know what is happening in your own.
They created this magnet of attention that is irrelevant. You will be forced to hand over your money by the system. The system and the meta-system will be forced. They are above the law. They will change the rules, even if it is evil.
Unless you are already invested before the growing frenzy right now, or you have significant resources to manipulate and shift trends within intra-day or across trading days, you are not the shark. You are the bread.
You do not need to invest in the IPO of SpaceX, Anthropic, and OpenAI.
You never did.
The views expressed here are purely the author’s own. This is not financial advice.
