Patience — or not17 Jun 2026 12:25
From Bloomberg -
SpaceX’s IPO wasn’t just a bet that investors would buy the stock. It was a bet that existing shareholders wouldn’t sell it.
For years, venture capital firms accumulated stakes in Elon Musk’s rocket company that are now worth tens of billions of dollars more than when they first acquired the shares. Founders Fund’s holdings are worth more than $50 billion. Sequoia Capital’s stake is worth more than $20 billion. Andreessen Horowitz stands to make the largest return in its history. Conventional wisdom says investors eventually sell. That’s what liquidity events are for. But nearly every venture capitalist I have spoken to since last week’s initial public offering has argued the opposite: The institutions receiving those shares will hold them.
Why? For one, the lockup terms don’t expire all at once — they allow more than 900 million shares to become eligible for sale following SpaceX’s first earnings report, with additional shares unlocking in stages beginning as early as August.
The long-term belief is embedded in the IPO itself. Several large existing shareholders agreed to lockup restrictions that extend through mid-2027, with stock becoming eligible for sale only in stages. The company doesn’t identify those investors. But the message is clear: The concern was never demand. It was supply.
“Many of them are not going to be selling,” Christian Garrett, an investing partner at 137 Ventures, told me when SpaceX’s opening trade was imminent, referring to the endowments, pension funds, foundations and family offices that will eventually receive distributed shares of the company from venture funds. Some investors may need liquidity, he said, but many institutions have held SpaceX exposure for years and are expected to remain owners.
Shaun Maguire of Sequoia went further. “I am personally going to hold my shares in this company forever, quite literally,” he told me in an interview on Bloomberg Television. “This is the biggest vision, the biggest mission of any company in history.”
When lockups expire, venture firms often distribute shares to their investors rather than sell them outright. Whether that stock ultimately hits the market depends on what those recipients do with it. The same goes for employees. And in SpaceX’s case, there was plenty of evidence that staffers did all they could to buy more shares through various programs before the IPO rather than take those opportunities to sell.
That is the bet now facing the market. Not whether investors want to own SpaceX, but whether the people who already own it will keep owning it. If venture capitalists are right, one of the largest wealth transfers in startup history could produce remarkably little selling pressure. If they’re wrong, the real test for SpaceX’s valuation won’t come from buyers chasing the stock today. It will come when billions of dollars of shares finally become available and their owners have to decide whether to take the money or stay along fo
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