Background: SpaceX is the world's largest private rocket and satellite company and sits at the centre of a growing ecosystem of Elon Musk's businesses. SpaceX owns Starlink, and also Musk’s other companies xAI and X (aka Twitter), which it acquired earlier this year. The company filed to go public later this year in an expected $2 trillion USD IPO…which would be the largest in history.

What happened: A detail buried deep within that IPO paperwork has revealed SpaceX is planning to open the offer to Australian retail investors. The filing also names UK, EU, Canada, Japan and Korea as other countries where retail investors can buy in at the IPO launch.

What else: That's pretty unusual because mega global IPOs rarely provide direct access to everyday Australian investors. This time though, CommSec has been named as the Australian retail broker... And it's

all part of SpaceX’s ploy to have retail investors as a critical part of its IPO.

What's the key learning?

💡 Institutional investors give you capital, but retail investors give you something harder to buy: cult-level loyalty. Musk has spent his career deliberately building a different kind of shareholder base when his companies go public.

💡 IPO pricing and public trading can look very different. Large IPOs usually allocate most of its shares to institutions like hedge funds, super funds, and asset managers who usually get first dibs because they can provide large amounts of capital upfront. But once a stock lists, factors like supply, demand, hype, and market sentiment can quickly push prices around.

💡SpaceX is taking a different approach to shareholder ownership: it plans to allocate up to 30% of IPO shares to retail investors - compared to the typical 5-10% for deals of this size. If Musk has learnt anything from his Tesla experience, he knows that the cult-level-retail-army will stick around through bad earnings and controversies - unlike institutional investors.