On June 12, 2026, Elon Musk’s commercial aerospace giant SpaceX will officially list on the Nasdaq under the ticker "SPCX," with an IPO price set at $135 per share, corresponding to a valuation of $1.77 trillion. This $75 billion fundraising effort is not only the largest IPO in human history but also provides us with an excellent analytical sample: just how much more did investors who entered at the Pre-IPO stage earn compared to those who bought in after the IPO?
From the Valuation Growth Curve, See the Real Returns of Pre-IPO Investment
Looking back at SpaceX’s funding history, the valuation curve presents a steep growth parabola. In 2021, SpaceX’s post-money valuation in its first round of private equity financing was approximately $100 billion. By 2022, secondary transaction valuations rose to about $125 billion, climbing to $137 billion in 2023. Entering December 2024, a tender offer locked the valuation at $350 billion, which then surged to $800 billion a year later in December 2025. By the most recent tender offer in February 2026, the post-money valuation had skyrocketed to $1.25 trillion. This means that even investors who entered at the end of 2024 saw their valuation increase by more than 4 times in just a year and a half.
Specifically, at the Pre-IPO trading price level, according to Gate TradFi data, as of June 5, 2026, SpaceX’s secondary market reference price was approximately $159 per share, an increase of over 17% compared to the SPCX IPO price.
The returns for early investors are even more astronomical. Google invested approximately $900 million in SpaceX in 2015, when the valuation was around $10 billion to $12 billion. Based on this IPO valuation, that investment’s value has skyrocketed to approximately $100 billion, representing a return of over 100 times. Early venture capital firm Valor Equity Partners began investing in 2006. Based on the target IPO valuation, its approximate 4% economic equity stake has a book value of nearly $65 billion, yielding compound returns of hundreds or even thousands of times. A senior analyst at PitchBook noted, "Even if you missed the 2010s, as long as you invested before 2021, you typically would have achieved returns of about 20 times."
In contrast, an investor entering at the IPO price of $135 with the same $900 million investment could only acquire approximately 6.66 million shares, representing less than 0.01% of the company’s total equity, an utterly incomparable scale to Google’s hundred-fold returns.
Pre-IPO vs. IPO: Historical Data Reveals the Returns Gap
Shifting focus from a single case to macro data, the return advantage of Pre-IPO stage investing is widespread. One study shows that the average return on Pre-IPO investments is approximately 43%, while returns for investors entering post-IPO are significantly lower. Data from another source confirms this pattern: between 2020 and 2023, the median valuation multiple of corporate IPOs compared to their last private financing round before listing was consistently above 2 times, even approaching 3 times in 2022. Other analyses indicate that if an investor buys on the IPO’s first trading day, investing in the S&P 500 index would yield higher returns in roughly three-quarters of cases.
The logic behind this is clear: Pre-IPO venture capital institutions lock in low valuations by entering early, capturing the vast majority of gains through the valuation spread between the private and public markets. By the time of the IPO’s public listing, the most explosive part of the growth phase has often already been "scooped up" by institutions.
High Returns Come with High Risks: SpaceX Isn’t Without Its Concerns
The high returns of Pre-IPO investing do not come without a cost. Take SpaceX as an example; its financial data presents a dichotomy. The prospectus shows consolidated revenue of $18.67 billion in 2025, but a net loss of $4.94 billion; in the first quarter of 2026, the net loss reached $4.28 billion, almost equaling the total loss for the entire previous year. Among its segments, the Connectivity business (centered on Starlink) is the only profitable division, posting an operating profit of $1.188 billion in Q1. However, the artificial intelligence segment, following the acquisition of xAI, suffered heavy losses, with an operating loss of $2.47 billion in the first quarter.
The divergence in capital market views on SpaceX’s valuation is also stark. The authoritative rating agency Morningstar gives a fair value estimate of approximately $780 billion, less than half of the IPO target valuation. The Danish pension fund AkademikerPension has even placed SpaceX on its investment blacklist, calling its dual-class share structure "disastrous." Meanwhile, some institutions believe that at a $1.75 trillion valuation, SpaceX’s price-to-sales ratio is as high as 93 times, far exceeding most tech leaders, and maintaining this valuation would require a compound annual growth rate of over 40% until 2030.
Clearly, Pre-IPO investment is essentially a bet on "narrative premium" and "future expectations"—you’re buying the opportunity for a company’s equity value to leap from private to public, you win on the valuation spread between primary and secondary markets, and you could lose on the downside risk from valuation overhang or fundamentals falling short of expectations.
How Can Retail Investors Participate? The Barriers to Pre-IPO are Being Dismantled
Pre-IPO investment has long been the exclusive domain of top-tier venture capital, private equity firms, and high-net-worth individuals, with minimum single transactions typically exceeding $10 million, leaving ordinary investors with virtually no entry point. However, this landscape is changing. In April 2026, Gate officially launched a digital Pre-IPOs participation mechanism, reducing the investment threshold to as low as 1 USDT through tokenized equity, opening the door to early-stage investment, typically reserved for institutions, to over 54 million users worldwide.
Take the asset certificate SPCX, corresponding to SpaceX, as an example. This product is a Mirror Note designed to reflect the market value changes of SpaceX before and after its IPO, supporting 24/7 trading. This addresses the pain points of low liquidity and long lock-up periods in the traditional private market. Within 24 hours of the subscription opening, the total subscription amount exceeded $353 million, fully demonstrating retail investors’ strong demand for Pre-IPO opportunities.
Conclusion
Which stage, Pre-IPO or IPO, is more profitable? Historical data and the SpaceX case provide a clear answer: Returns from the Pre-IPO stage far exceed those from post-IPO entry. Early investors, by locking in low valuations upfront, shared in the steepest growth curve of a company’s transition from private to public. In contrast, investors entering after the IPO can only buy in at already significantly elevated valuations, capturing relatively limited upside potential.
However, high returns inevitably come with high risks. SpaceX’s massive valuation controversies, its reality of substantial losses, and the potential for valuation overhang all serve as reminders to investors: The core of Pre-IPO investing lies in finding a balance between "early-stage premiums" and "fundamental risks," not in blindly chasing so-called "wealth-creation myths."
It is worth noting that as digital Pre-IPOs mechanisms on platforms like Gate mature, ordinary investors, for the first time, have a truly accessible entry point into early-stage investment. This structural change may well redefine the distribution of wealth in future capital markets.
