The rocket company is reserving 30% of its float for retail buyers, an unprecedented concession that changes who can get in and does almost nothing about who actually gets paid.
SpaceX is dangling roughly $22.5 billion in retail allocation, a 30% slice of float set aside for individual investors in an offering that could raise $75 billion at a $1.75 trillion valuation. That share, as WIRED reports, dwarfs the 5% to 10% retail slice typical of large IPOs, and the company has brokerages like Fidelity cutting minimums so smaller buyers can participate. The access is real. The wealth math that built every prior blockbuster IPO runs on a different rail, and it is still pointed at insiders, employees, and institutional asset managers.
The mechanism that turns an IPO into generational wealth has three parts, and none of them are about who shows up on day one. The first is allocation preference. When a hot offering is oversubscribed, the underwriters allocate shares to their best customers first, which in practice means the large institutions, sovereign wealth funds, and the issuing company's own insiders. Retail buyers get whatever is left, and in most retail brokerages that is zero. SpaceX is rewriting the first part by mandating that 30% of available shares go to retail, with Fidelity and others lowering their account minimums to capture that demand.
The second part is the lockup. Employees, early venture investors, and founders like Elon Musk cannot sell their pre-IPO shares for a defined period, typically 180 days, after the stock begins trading. The point is to prevent a flood of insider selling from crushing the price in the first weeks. During that window, the only shares changing hands are the small float set aside for new buyers. Once the lockup expires, the dynamic flips. Insiders begin selling, supply expands, and the price discovery that was suppressed during the IPO pops. Retail buyers who bought at the offering price are now holding shares that the people who actually own the company are actively exiting. Campbell Harvey, a finance professor at Duke's Fuqua School of Business, points out that the historical evidence on IPO performance after lockup expiry is consistently ugly for the retail cohort that bought at issuance.
The third part is the secondary market. After the lockup lifts, the same shares that were allocation-rationed at the IPO trade freely, and the price usually reflects a discount to where true supply-and-demand settles. The retail buyer who wanted in at $X can often buy a few months later at $X-minus-something, without the allocation lottery, and without the underwriting fees baked into the offering price. The IPO's job is to maximize proceeds for the issuer and early sellers. The retail buyer is a structural source of demand, not a structural beneficiary of returns.
SpaceX's 30% carve-out changes part one. It forces the float to include a much larger retail slice, and brokerages that lower their minimums are reducing a real frictional barrier to entry. That is a meaningful change for the thousands of people who have never been able to get IPO allocations at all. It is not a change to the wealth-concentration engine. Employees and early investors still hold the bulk of the company's equity at the IPO price. Musk's own stake, valued at the reported $1.75 trillion, is the largest single position. Institutional asset managers with existing relationships to SpaceX's underwriters will still get the preferred allocations inside the retail bucket. The 30% is bigger than usual, but it is still 30%, and the other 70% is doing exactly what 70% in any other IPO does: flowing to people who were already rich when the shares priced.
There is a deeper reason the "you can buy SpaceX" frame flatters the offering. A retail investor who buys at the IPO and holds through lockup expiry is, on average, buying at the highest point in the price curve rather than the lowest. The allocations go to the people who don't need to time the market, because they aren't trading the market. They are selling. When the WIRED piece asks whether regular investors will get rich off the SpaceX IPO, the structural answer is no, not because the company won't succeed, but because the distribution mechanism is designed to put the largest gains in the hands of the people who already hold the most shares at the lowest basis. Expanded access is a real concession. Expanded opportunity is a different question, and the offering structure does not address it.
What to watch next: the lockup expiry date, which will be set in the S-1 filing and will mark the moment retail buyers first see real insider selling pressure, and the secondary-market price action in the weeks that follow, which will reveal what the stock is actually worth once the IPO demand subsidy fades.