Elon Musk Can’t Sell SpaceX Shares for a Year But Others Can Dump on Day 1

SpaceX is listed on Nasdaq on Thursday, June 11, at $135 a share, the largest IPO in history. Elon Musk cannot sell a single share for a year, but the investors his team personally selected to participate in the offering can sell immediately.

SpaceX reserved 5 per cent of the offering for a direct share program (DSP), with participants chosen “at the discretion of executive officers,” who carry no lockup restrictions whatsoever.

Why the Lockup Structure Is Unusual

Standard IPOs impose a 180-day lockup on all insiders. SpaceX’s structure does the opposite for a select group. The Australian Financial Review reported that a specific hedge fund is already preparing to sell its SpaceX stake as soon as it can.

Early investors who did not receive a DSP allocation face a staggered release, starting with 20% after the first earnings report, followed by 7% tranches at 70, 90, 105, 120, and 135 days. DSP participants face none of it.

As BeInCrypto reported in its analysis of the SpaceX-Anthropic IPO race, the concentration of early investor stakes and the unusual deal structure were already among the risks that set this IPO apart from anything Wall Street has seen before.

The SpaceX IPO Selling Pressure Ahead

Chad Anderson, founder of Space Capital and an early SpaceX investor, stated his intentions plainly: “We’ve been invested for almost ten years, it’s our business to return capital to investors.” That also appears to be a direct statement of intent to sell.

The 5 per cent DSP tranche adds a layer of selling that retail buyers on Robinhood, Fidelity, and Schwab will face from the opening bell.

Morningstar’s analysts put SpaceX’s fair value at roughly half its IPO price and advised investors to wait for the hype to pass.

Moreover, the same week that brings the world’s biggest IPO also brings CPI data and a market that has spent the month pricing in a Fed rate hike.

The founder cannot sell. His chosen investors can. Thursday will show which side of that equation sets the price.

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