SpaceX wants $1.8 trillion for going public. Early investors who gave them money when the company was worth less will now have more money because the company is worth more. Revolutionary stuff.
This represents one of the biggest paper gains in venture capital history. Paper gains. Not actual gains. Paper. The kind you can't spend until you sell, which you won't, because then you'd pay taxes and lose your bragging rights at Sundance.
Retail traders are studying this headline right now. Taking notes. Circling words like "early bets" and "venture capital history." Wondering how they can get in on the next SpaceX. They cannot. The next SpaceX already happened. It was SpaceX. They missed it because they were busy buying dogshit tokens named after dogs.
The strategy here was simple. Write a check when rockets exploded. Wait fifteen years. Watch valuation go from startup to larger than most countries' GDP. Collect trophy. The hard part was having money in the first place and knowing Elon Musk before he was famous for naming children after Wi-Fi passwords.
Venture capitalists will tell you this story at conferences. They'll call it vision. They'll say they saw something others didn't. What they saw was a pitch deck and a coin flip that landed heads. Half the rockets blew up. The other half didn't. That's the whole story.
Some guy with a Robinhood account just read this headline and Googled "how to invest in pre-IPO companies." The answer is be rich already or work at Goldman. He is neither. He will spend the next six months on Reddit learning about SPACs from teenagers.
The rewards are theoretical until the IPO happens. The IPO might not happen. Elon might tweet something f*cked up and tank the whole thing. He's done it before. He'll do it again. But sure, start spending that paper money now.
Leave a Comment