There are IPOs, and then there is what SpaceX pulled off on Friday. The initial public offering for Elon Musk’s rocket shop didn’t just exceed previous IPOs—it blew them out of the water. SpaceX raised an eye-popping $75 billion, which is roughly triple what the previous record holder, Saudi Arabia’s Aramco, pulled in during its 2019 IPO, and nearly five times what a little company called Meta pulled in when it went public. Everyone wanted a piece of this thing, and that included crypto companies, which pre-sold tokenized versions of SpaceX stock that promised their customers a slice of the pie. Oops.
When the dust settled on the IPO, it emerged that customers who pre-bought SpaceX tokens on exchanges like Bybit and Binance came up dry. The reason is that the exchanges believed they had lined up an allocation of pre-IPO shares through Kraken-owned xStocks. But when push came to shove, it turned out that Elon had not set aside as many shares for retail investors as some had hoped, and so xStocks found itself at the back of the line. The upshot is that those who bought the token version of SpaceX stock either received a smaller allocation. (Many reported receiving 4.3 shares of SPCX or none at all.)
