The SpaceX Squeeze
Fast track index demand, Universal activism/M&A and abandoned Bitcoins.
You could take the cynical view, and a lot of people do.1 The cynical view is that SpaceX has a private market valuation of, let’s say, $1.25 trillion, but that valuation has been set by Elon Musk and his friends without a lot of robust debate, and is arguably a little high given that SpaceX loses money on something like $20 billion a year of revenue. Elon Musk and his friends would now like to sell their SpaceX stock to the public, ideally at a large markup to that $1.25 trillion valuation. (Maybe $2 trillion, or at least $1.8 trillion.) The advantage of doing this is that the public is very large and has a lot of money, so it can buy a lot of stock. The disadvantage is that the public is not made up entirely of Elon Musk and his friends, and if you say to public investors “hey this company is worth $2 trillion,” they might say “why?”
But not all of them. There are, traditionally, two sorts of investors who will buy stock without worrying about the price:
