Some doors in finance are not locked so much as priced. The velvet rope outside the year’s hottest deals is rarely a sign on the wall. It is a number in your account, and for most people that number has always sat out of reach.
That is how the initial public offering, or IPO, has worked for decades. A company hires a syndicate of banks, the banks call their best clients, and the shares that matter get spoken for before the rest of us learn the name.
Retail buyers usually get whatever is left, and only after the stock starts trading, often at a price the early crowd already ran up. Roughly 95% of the shares in a sought-after debut go to big institutional investors, University of Florida finance professor Jay Ritter estimated for CNBC.
Now, one of the country’s largest brokerages has moved that rope, and it did so for the biggest stock market debut anyone has ever attempted.
Fidelity said it will let ordinary customers place an order for shares of Elon Musk‘s SpaceX (SPCX) at the IPO price, and the account minimum is a sliver of what it used to be.
What Fidelity just changed for everyday investors
On June 4, Fidelity laid out how its brokerage customers can chase a piece of the deal. You sign up for IPO alerts, read the prospectus, submit a nonbinding indication of interest, then confirm the order once the price is set, according to Fidelity.
The number that matters is the entry fee. Fidelity normally wants $500,000 in an account before it will take your indication of interest on an IPO. For SpaceX it cut that to $2,000, Barron’s reported.
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When I lined up the new floor against the old one, the barrier had effectively dropped by more than 99%.
Fidelity tied the move to supply. SpaceX is setting aside up to 30% of the offering for retail buyers, far above the norm. Most IPOs “offer retail customers only 5% to 10% of the total offering,” Fidelity said.
The brokers are not moving in lockstep. Charles Schwab (SCHW) still wants $100,000 in an account, while Robinhood Markets (HOOD), SoFi Technologies (SOFI) and Morgan Stanley’s (MS) E*Trade set no portfolio minimum at all, Barron’s reported.
How the largest IPO ever reached this point
SpaceX plans to sell 555.6 million Class A shares at a fixed $135 each, a roughly $75 billion raise that would value the company near $1.77 trillion, according to CNBC.
That would be the largest IPO in history, more than triple Alibaba’s $22 billion record from 2014. The deal is led by Goldman Sachs (GS), Morgan Stanley, Bank of America (BAC), Citigroup (C), and JPMorgan Chase (JPM).
Founded in 2002, SpaceX grew from a rocket startup into a company spanning launches, defense contracts, the Starlink satellite network and, after a 2026 tie-up with xAI, artificial intelligence.
Related: Anthropic scales its most powerful AI a day after filing to IPO
Musk will hold about 82.4% of the voting power after the offering, the same kind of ironclad control he wields at Tesla (TSLA). That makes SpaceX a controlled company exempt from some Nasdaq governance rules.
Here is the deal by the numbers:
- A $1.77 trillion valuation at $135 a share, more than triple Alibaba’s record 2014 debut, according to CNBC
- Up to 30% of shares reserved for retail buyers, versus the usual 5% to 10%, Fidelity confirms
- A $2,000 Fidelity account minimum, down from as much as $500,000, Barron’s indicates
- 2025 revenue of $18.674 billion, up 33%, against a net loss of about $4.94 billion, based on SpaceX’s SEC filing as reported by Fortune
- An independent fair value of about $780 billion from Morningstar, according to Fortune
At $1.77 trillion, SpaceX would rank as roughly the seventh most valuable U.S. company, just ahead of Tesla, Kiplinger noted.
What the SpaceX IPO could mean for your portfolio
Open access is not the same as a sure thing. By my math, the 555.6 million shares on offer are only about 4% of the roughly 13 billion shares SpaceX will have outstanding. A float that thin can send a stock lurching in both directions in its first days.
There is also a leash on quick profits. Sell your allocated SpaceX shares within 15 calendar days, and Fidelity can bar you from new offerings for a stretch, with repeat sellers facing a permanent ban tied to their Social Security number, according to Fidelity.
Then there is price. The $1.77 trillion tag sits more than twice Morningstar’s independent fair value of about $780 billion for a company that is not yet profitable, Fortune reported.
Some advisers read Fidelity’s lowered bar as a marketing strategy as much as a show of generosity. The change “provides the optics that shares are available to more investors,” said David Kudla, chief executive of Mainstay Capital Management, in comments to Barron’s.
In my analysis, the door is genuinely open, but walking through it does not guarantee a seat. An indication of interest only puts you in line. Allocation is decided the morning after pricing, and you may get a handful of shares, or none.
Why a hot IPO summer is just starting
SpaceX begins its investor roadshow this week, with pricing expected June 11 and trading on the Nasdaq set to begin June 12.
It will not be alone for long. Anthropic filed confidentially for its own IPO on June 1, and OpenAI is preparing to follow, setting up a run of trillion-dollar listings that will test how much fresh stock public markets can absorb.
The velvet rope has moved. Whether you step past it comes down to one honest question, the same one the institutions are quietly asking.
Are you buying a piece of the future at a fair price, or paying tomorrow’s valuation for the privilege of getting in first?
Related: SpaceX lands a $4 billion deal right before its IPO
