As SpaceX goes public, a $100 billion shadow market confronts a reckoning
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A day ahead of the spectacle of SpaceX’s IPO, the much anticipated trillion-plus valuation of the company—a Frankensteined creature of Elon Musk’s dreams and realities—is emerging as an investor Rorschach test.
Key facts
As companies have stayed private longer, they’ve also gotten bigger and more sought-after: OpenAI—according to private market investors—is worth a cool $852 billion, while five-year-old Anthropic
The average venture-backed unicorn now remains private for 10 years at minimum, and there are about half as many public companies today as there were in 1996
In special purpose vehicles, people are trading units, not trading shares,” said Glen Anderson, cofounder and CEO of Rainmaker Securities
For example: Industry Ventures, a firm bought by Goldman Sachs in October, is considered serious and credible
Summary
But for one group of investors—those who purchased SpaceX stock on the overheated and shadowy market for “secondary” shares, the company’s listing day will initiate a nerve-racking moment of truth. The line between public and private equities has been blurring over the past 20 years, and nowhere has this been more true than in the secondaries market—the parallel and sometimes-fraud-riddled financial market where investors buy, sell, and effectively gamble for shares of the world’s sexiest private companies. Given the mammoth size of the U.S. venture secondaries market—an elephant-size black box that, in 2025, was estimated at somewhere between $62.5 billion and $120.9 billion—it’s not a question of whether fraud will be uncovered when SpaceX IPOs; it’s a question of how much fraud will be uncovered.