Just two more days...

On Friday, SpaceX hits the market in what will be the largest IPO in history.

It should instantly slot in as the eighth-largest company in the world by market capitalization, right behind Broadcom (AVGO).

If you’ve been following along, you know I’m a huge fan of SpaceX the company.

What Elon Musk has built is extraordinary... the reusable rockets, Starlink, the vision for orbital artificial intelligence (AI) data centers. I've met former SpaceX engineers. I watch the launches with my kids. This is one of the great innovation stories of our lifetimes.

But I won't be buying the stock Friday. Here's why.

• History has a clear verdict on IPOs.

Since launching in October 2013, the first IPO ETF has returned 188%. The S&P 500 is up 444% over the same period. The Nasdaq’s returned 927%. From analyst Charlie Bilello:

Source: @CharlieBilello on X

But that captures almost all US IPOs. Does the picture change when we narrow it to big, highly-anticipated tech IPOs?

Truist analyst Keith Lerner studied the returns of Meta Platforms (META), Twitter (now X), Uber (UBER), Airbnb (ABNB), and 26 other IPOs that fit this description.

Here’s the median return across all 30:

• One week after IPO: +3%

  
  

• One month after: +1%

  
  

• Three months after: +4%

  
  

• Six months after: -9%

  
  

• Twelve months after: -9%

Not great.

And here’s how they performed individually. A mixed bag:

Source: Yahoo Finance

There’s no real trend in the raw returns here. Palantir Technologies (PLTR), Datadog (DDOG), and Zoom (ZM) would’ve doubled your money in a year. Coinbase (COIN), Robinhood (HOOD), Rivian (RIVN), and Lyft (LYFT) would’ve taken more than half your money in a year.

But there is an important theme hiding behind these numbers. Many of these stocks went on to produce extraordinary returns.

Meta is up 1,438% since its IPO. CrowdStrike (CRWD) is up 1,796%. Shopify (SHOP) is up 3,800%. Palantir is up about 1,335%.

But realize: You could’ve bought most of these companies at or below their IPO prices in the months after their IPOs!

Meta was cut in half in its first few months. CrowdStrike was available at a 25% discount. Even Shopify was up only 2% one year after its IPO, essentially flat.

The only real exception to this is Palantir, which soared in its first three months and never looked back. But this is rare in big, hyped-up tech IPOs. Most of the time, patience pays.

• The “IPO curse” has an even more specific form.

When the single most coveted company in a hot sector goes public, it has a habit of marking a near-term top. Not just for that stock, but for the whole sector.

AOL-Time Warner. Still the largest merger in history, back in January 2000. The Nasdaq peaked eight weeks later.

Blackstone (BX), the king of private equity, went public in June 2007. The S&P 500 topped four months later. Blackstone's own stock fell nearly 90% over next year and a half.

Glencore IPO'd in May 2011, the blow-off top on commodities. It didn't see that IPO price again for 11 years.

Coinbase went public in April 2021. Bitcoin (BTC) peaked that exact same day and spent years recovering.

• How much more money can patience make you?

Consider Meta. It IPO'd in May 2012 at $38 a share, a $104 billion valuation, and amid enormous hype.

It stumbled immediately. Five months later, it was down 54% from its IPO price. Barron's ran a famous "thumbs down" cover declaring it still overvalued.

Source: Barron’s

Of course, Meta went on to produce extraordinary returns, now up over 1,438% from its IPO price.

But had you waited for the market to sober up and instead bought it after its 50%+ decline, your returns doubled to 3,242%.

The lesson: Great companies can have terrible IPOs. With highly anticipated tech IPOs, this happens more often than not. 

• SpaceX’s valuation makes patience even more important.

SpaceX is going public at roughly 100X sales. Anthropic, the fastest-growing big company in the world and likely in all of history, trades at about 20X sales on the private markets.

As I showed you on Friday, SpaceX as a whole is not yet profitable. Starlink is. But the company overall posted a net loss of about $4.9 billion in 2025 and another $4.3 billion loss in Q1 2026.

The valuation is almost entirely built on the promise of orbital AI data centers, the part of SpaceX I’m most bullish on. But we’re not there yet.

Remove that story, and you have an $800 billion to $900 billion business—not $1.8 trillion. At 100X sales, you're paying for a near-perfect future on Day 1.

• My verdict: Guilty until proven innocent.

Due to the unique mechanics of SpaceX’s IPO, I could see it having a stellar debut. It could surge out of the gate in its first week, or even its first month.

But I’ll stick my neck out and predict that you’ll be able to buy SpaceX at a lower price than its IPO price eventually, after the sugar high fades.

So SpaceX goes straight to the top of my watchlist. Long term, it could be one of the great investments of our era.

But on Friday, I'll be watching from the sidelines.

Don't let FOMO override history. Your chance at a better price will almost certainly come.

Stephen McBride Chief Analyst, RiskHedge

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