The SpaceX IPO isn't priced like a rocket company. It's priced like a religion.
$135 a share. A $1.75 trillion valuation. SpaceX reported $18.67 billion in revenue last year. That's roughly 67 times sales - three times what Nvidia trades at. Someone has to believe this is rational.
But if you want to know whether the people who built it believe it, don't read the prospectus. Read the lockup.
A lockup is the period after an IPO when insiders - founders, employees, early investors - are prohibited from selling. The standard is 180 days. It exists so the stock doesn't get flooded the day it starts trading. When I say "flooded," I mean a wall of supply that no amount of demand can absorb without the price collapsing.
SpaceX is doing something different. The company's S-1 filing, submitted to the SEC in May, describes a tiered unlock. On the first cliff - tied to the Q2 earnings release, expected sometime between mid-July and September - insiders can sell 20% of their eligible shares. That's not six months after the IPO. That could be as few as four months. If the stock rises 30% above the $135 opening price, another 10% unlocks on top.
This is not a structure you design because you think insiders should wait. It's a structure you design because you've done the math on when selling hurts least.
Most people frame the pre-IPO question as a moral one. Should SpaceX employees cash out before the company goes public? The financial press covers it that way. Brokers covering the story write columns about patience and long-term conviction. But brokers in the private secondary market - platforms like Forge Global and Nasdaq Private Market that facilitate pre-IPO share sales - don't make money on patience. They take roughly 5% of each transaction. They want employees to sell now, at a discount, through their platform.
And yet SpaceX's own unlock schedule is structured to keep insiders from flooding the market all at once. The tiers aren't there to preserve value for buyers. They're there to preserve value for sellers who want to be buyers too - or at least don't want to be the ones who pushed the price down.
Here's what the numbers tell you. SpaceX was valued at about $800 billion in a December 2025 private share sale. At the $135 IPO price, that's a 118% gain in six months for anyone who held through the secondary. If you bought in earlier, at the $400 billion mark, it's more than 300%. No wonder the unlock is staggered. Everyone wants out, but nobody wants to be the first one through the door.
This is where the obvious question gives way to the useful one. The obvious question is whether you should sell your SpaceX shares. The useful question is what the unlock structure tells you about the gap between the price insiders can sell at and the price the market will sustain.
A 67x revenue multiple requires revenue that doesn't just grow - it compounds at a rate no company has ever achieved. Even the underwriters who priced this IPO at $1.75 trillion need SpaceX to deliver superlinear growth for years to come. I don't think the company will fail. Starship development is further along than most people outside the industry realize. Starlink is generating real revenue. But superlinear growth is a heavy assumption to price into a stock before anyone has stress-tested it in public markets.
The tiered lockup is the stress test. Let 20% of insiders sell. See what happens. If the stock absorbs it and climbs, unlock more. If it wobbles, the rest stay locked a while longer. The company has effectively built a circuit breaker into its own distribution plan.
What should a public-market buyer make of this?
I'd watch the first unlock date closely. If that initial 20% of insider shares hits the market and the stock drops 10% or more, you have your answer about whether the $1.75 trillion is a story the market can carry or just a story the underwriters told each other. If it holds flat or rises, the valuation has earned some credibility - not all of it, but enough to say demand exceeds insider supply even after the discount vanishes.
The thing about a 67x revenue multiple is that it's not wrong because of the revenue. It's wrong if the growth rate falls short of what the multiple assumes. That's the bet. Not whether SpaceX is a good company. Whether the market will keep paying like one before growth proves it.
I suspect the unlock schedule is the clearest signal anyone has. It tells you exactly what SpaceX's own insiders think about timing, supply, and demand. They don't want to sell everything at once. But they don't want to wait 180 days either. That middle ground - sell some, test the water, adjust - is the most honest thing in the prospectus.