One week before SpaceX was set to start trading, the Nasdaq - the technology-heavy stock index that functions as a rough thermometer for growth stocks - had its worst single day since April of the previous year. According to CNBC's Leslie Picker, that may not be a coincidence.

The thesis is simple and slightly alarming: retail investors, the everyday people who buy and sell stocks through apps and brokerage accounts rather than trading desks, want in on the biggest initial public offering - the first time a company sells shares to the public - in stock market history. To get in, they may need to raise cash. And to raise cash, they may need to sell something they already own.

That something, increasingly, is semiconductors, AI hardware stocks, and a type of product called a levered ETF - an exchange-traded fund that uses borrowed money to amplify returns, meaning that when it rises, it rises faster than the underlying assets, and when it falls, it falls much harder. The question Wall Street is quietly asking this week is not just how big the SpaceX IPO will be. It is how badly the scramble to get into it could disrupt everything sitting next to it.

The Background

SpaceX, formally Space Exploration Technologies Corp., is Elon Musk's rocket and satellite company. It controls roughly 80% of all global rocket launches, and its Starlink satellite internet network has grown from a niche product for remote areas into a commercial and military infrastructure business serving millions of customers worldwide.

For most of its existence, SpaceX was private - meaning ordinary investors could not buy shares. The company raised money from venture capital firms, institutional investors, and secondary market transactions where existing shareholders sold to accredited buyers. In December 2025, SpaceX shares traded in one of those private transactions at a valuation of roughly $800 billion - already among the largest companies on Earth.

Then everything accelerated. SpaceX publicly filed its S-1 prospectus with the SEC on 20 May 2026, offering investors a first public view of its internal finances. Share pricing is expected after market close on 11 June, with the first trading day targeted for 12 June on Nasdaq under the ticker SPCX.

At a $75 billion raise and $1.75 trillion valuation, this would be the largest initial public offering in stock market history. For context, Saudi Aramco - the oil giant whose 2019 IPO was previously the record holder - raised roughly $25 billion at a $2 trillion valuation. SpaceX is raising three times that amount.

There is one other notable thing about the IPO's design. Elon Musk is allocating as much as 30% of the shares to retail investors, according to Reuters - a significant departure from usual Wall Street practice, where retail access is typically capped at between 5% and 10% of the offering. The stated goal is to encourage longer-term ownership and avoid the quick institutional flips that can drive a stock down sharply after debut day.

That 30% figure is central to what happens next.

What Is Actually Happening

The CNBC report from Picker breaks down a specific concern that has been building in financial markets ahead of the listing. Retail investors are expected to make up 30% of the SpaceX deal. But retail investors, unlike large funds or pension managers, are not sitting on idle pools of cash waiting to be deployed. Many of them are already fully invested - often in the same high-momentum technology stocks that have been leading markets upward.

In the past month alone, Picker reports, a single chip company - Micron Technology - saw $6.5 billion in net retail buying, which helped push the stock up 87%. More broadly, U.S. equity levered ETF assets have reached an all-time high of more than $175 billion, concentrated in the Nasdaq 100 and semiconductor funds.

This is the pile that now needs to be liquidated. At least in part.

Greg Boutle, head of U.S. equity derivative strategy at BNP Paribas, estimated that retail and passive investors might sell a combined $50 billion of other stocks to raise funds for buying SpaceX. And if the IPO performs well, that figure could rise. A further cascading effect is possible if levered ETFs and commodity trading advisors join in, as mechanical rebalancing is triggered. On top of that, the SpaceX IPO is happening near the end of the second quarter, when more than $100 billion of stock sales unrelated to the IPO were already expected.

The problem, as Boutle put it, is not any single flow. "The danger for the market is not the individual flows, but the cumulative effect."

Then there is the post-IPO mechanics. Picker flags that after the stock starts trading, SpaceX-related options and levered ETFs are set to list the following week. And in the weeks after that, index rules will force an estimated $22 to $27 billion in automatic buying from funds tracking the S&P 500 and Nasdaq-100. That means funds that track these indexes - products that hundreds of millions of pension savers and passive investors own without actively thinking about it - will be forced to buy SpaceX shares at whatever the market price happens to be.

The float - the portion of shares actually available to trade on the open market - is very small relative to the company's total value. Elon Musk owns approximately 42% of SpaceX's equity and controls 85% of voting power through a dual-class share structure where he holds super-voting shares. A tiny public float plus massive inbound demand is a classic recipe for violent price moves.

The Money Trail

The most revealing thread in the CNBC report concerns not retail investors but the banks underwriting the deal - and a regulatory rule that was quietly unwound six months ago.

Morgan Stanley projects SpaceX will generate $3.4 trillion in annual revenue by 2040, driven primarily by its AI business. Goldman Sachs is even more bullish on SpaceX's near-term AI revenue, projecting $322 billion by 2030. These numbers circulated in the days before the IPO roadshow began.

The anchor point is the present. SpaceX swung to a $4.94 billion net loss in 2025 on revenue of $18.67 billion. Morgan Stanley's $3.4 trillion revenue estimate for 2040 would represent a 182-fold increase on that number in 14 years. As Picker noted, no institutional investor she spoke to said they were buying on fundamentals. The trade is a bet on a very specific, very bullish future.

For context, that revenue figure would exceed the current GDP of France.

There is a second layer of interest here. There are 21 banks on the deal, with Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley holding the top two roles and standing to earn the largest share of hundreds of millions in fees. Both banks are simultaneously the deal's most prominent underwriters and the source of the sky-high projections. That arrangement was not always permitted.

The 2003 global settlement, negotiated by then-New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer, required that analysis and investment banking be walled off after investigations found Wall Street's late-1990s model - where stock analysts were fully integrated into the investment banking operations of brokerage houses - was, in Spitzer's words, "fundamentally corrupt." The settlement cost the banks $1.4 billion in penalties and structural reforms.

The SEC consented to the termination of those undertakings on December 5, 2025 - roughly six months before the SpaceX roadshow launched. The timing is, at minimum, notable. Goldman and Morgan Stanley's projections were not formally published as research; they were communicated to investors during the roadshow. But within 24 hours of each other, those numbers were in the press. Picker, to her credit, named the tension without resolving it: the rule said you cannot publish, but if you share internally and those numbers then reach the public, the wall is more permeable than advertised.

The practical effect is that the banks most incentivised to see SpaceX priced as high as possible are also the source of the models being used to justify that price. That is not a conspiracy - it is a structural conflict of interest.

What People Are Doing About It

The market's response has already begun. Retail investors have been rotating out of high-momentum technology positions in the weeks before the IPO. The Micron sell-off mentioned in the CNBC segment is one example. Bitcoin has also been cited as a potential source of funds - a pattern consistent with previous episodes where retail investors liquidated crypto positions to fund equity purchases.

Tema ETFs' Space Innovators ETF, which launched on March 30 and trades under the ticker NASA, crossed $1 billion in assets in just 37 trading days, and by the end of the prior trading week had reached over $2.6 billion in assets. The fund already holds privately traded SpaceX shares and has no stated plan to sell them after the IPO, meaning some investors are trying to get exposure before the listing rather than compete for shares on opening day.

Institutional investors - the large funds and pension managers who professionally allocate capital - are approaching the deal differently. According to Picker, there is ample cash available on the institutional side, and these investors are evaluating the deal on two tracks: the fundamental case, which requires swallowing the long-dated projections from Morgan Stanley and Goldman, or the technical trade, which means buying on day one in anticipation of index-driven price pressure in the weeks that follow.

Index funds themselves have no choice in the matter. When SpaceX enters the S&P 500 and Nasdaq-100, the funds that track those indexes must buy it. That mechanical demand - unrelated to any view on SpaceX's business - is expected to create a floor underneath the stock in the weeks after listing. Some investors are positioning ahead of that forced buying.

Ordinary brokerage clients in the U.S. are being offered IPO access through their trading platforms in quantities that would have been unusual in previous large listings. The 30% retail allocation is part of that design. Whether retail buyers who receive shares on day one will hold through the volatility or sell quickly is unknown. The track record of retail participation in high-profile IPOs - WeWork, Rivian, Robinhood itself - has been mixed at best.

The Bottom Line

SpaceX's IPO this week is not just a corporate finance event. It is also a test of how much the rest of the stock market can absorb when $75 billion in new demand lands on top of an already-stretched system. The mechanism is specific: retail investors liquidate current holdings to fund purchases, levered products amplify those moves, and passive index funds add forced buying once SpaceX enters the indexes. The projections from the underwriting banks - up to $3.4 trillion in revenue by 2040 for a company losing money today - are not analysis. They are the marketing collateral for the most consequential stock market event of the year. Whether the hype holds or the landing is rough, the bill lands somewhere.

Timeline

  • April 2003 - The SEC and Eliot Spitzer finalize a $1.4 billion global settlement with ten major Wall Street banks, requiring the separation of research analysts from investment banking.
  • July 2025 - SpaceX is valued at approximately $400 billion in a private secondary market transaction.
  • December 2025 - A SpaceX private tender offer values the company at around $800 billion. The SEC consents to terminating the 2003 Global Research Analyst Settlement undertakings, removing the formal wall between analyst research and investment banking at large banks.
  • February 2026 - SpaceX acquires xAI in an all-stock deal, creating a combined entity valued at approximately $1.25 trillion.
  • March 30, 2026 - Tema ETFs launches its Space Innovators ETF (NASA) with direct SpaceX exposure.
  • April 1, 2026 - SpaceX confidentially files its S-1 registration with the SEC.
  • May 20, 2026 - SpaceX publicly files its S-1 prospectus, revealing a $4.28 billion net loss in Q1 2026 and an accumulated deficit of $41.3 billion.
  • May 30, 2026 - The Tema NASA ETF surpasses $2.6 billion in assets, one of the fastest asset-gathering runs in ETF history.
  • June 4, 2026 - SpaceX's IPO roadshow launches ahead of schedule after a quicker-than-expected SEC review.
  • June 5, 2026 - Morgan Stanley projects SpaceX revenue at $3.4 trillion in 2040; Goldman Sachs projects $322 billion in AI revenue by 2030. Both figures circulate to the press within 24 hours.
  • June 7, 2026 - BNP Paribas warns the IPO could trigger $50 billion in market-wide selling. The Nasdaq records its worst session since April 2025 - one week before the planned listing.
  • June 8, 2026 - CNBC's Leslie Picker reports on the potential market-moving mechanics of the SpaceX IPO ahead of pricing.
  • June 11, 2026 - Share pricing expected after market close. A dedicated event for approximately 1,500 retail investors is planned.
  • June 12, 2026 - First day of trading on Nasdaq under ticker SPCX is expected.

Summary

Who: SpaceX, Elon Musk, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley (lead underwriters), retail investors, BNP Paribas analyst Greg Boutle, CNBC reporter Leslie Picker.

What: SpaceX is set to complete the largest IPO in stock market history, raising $75 billion at a $1.75 trillion valuation. The mechanics of the deal - a small public float, a 30% retail allocation, $3.4 trillion analyst projections, and pending index inclusion - are triggering a cascade of market repositioning that began before the company listed a single share.

When: Shares price on 11 June 2026. First trading day is 12 June 2026 on the Nasdaq under the ticker SPCX.

Where: Nasdaq, New York. The financial effects are expected to ripple across U.S. equity markets and potentially beyond.

Why: SpaceX's unusual IPO design - including a very small free float relative to its valuation, an outsized retail allocation, and the near-simultaneous arrival of SpaceX-linked ETFs and options - creates conditions where buying pressure in one corner of the market can force selling in another. The cumulative effect, not any single trade, is what analysts believe makes this IPO a potential source of broader market volatility.