GoKawiilElon Musk is photographed at SpaceX in Brownsville, Texas. Marvin Joseph | The Washington Post | Getty Images
The SpaceX initial public offering on Friday is poised to be the biggest ever — and is generating a lot of buzz. But IPOs can carry dangers for the average investor, according to finance experts. For starters, stocks are often unprofitable in the early period after an IPO, experts said. And buying individual companies — instead of investment funds with a broadly diversified basket of stocks — can make that volatility more acute for unwary investors due to their concentrated positions. There's good news, though: Investors who want a piece of SpaceX don't have to buy the stock outright. There are ample mutual funds and exchange-traded funds that hold SpaceX positions, or will do so after the company goes public. They would hold the stock as one sliver of a broader investment portfolio.
The same is true of other highly anticipated, blockbuster IPOs slated for this year, like those of Anthropic and OpenAI, experts said. "There will be other ways investors can access the stock, other than buying the IPO," said Zachary Evens, an analyst of passive strategies at Morningstar. At $135 per share, SpaceX would be valued at nearly $1.8 trillion, making it the seventh-biggest company in the U.S. by market capitalization. The IPO is poised to make CEO Elon Musk the world's first trillionaire.
How to get access to SpaceX in index funds
Vehicles drive past a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket displayed outside a Space Exploration Technologies Corp. facility in Hawthorne, California, on June 8, 2026. Patrick T. Fallon | Afp | Getty Images
The universe of investment funds for retail investors generally falls into two categories: those that are actively managed and others that are passively managed. The latter, known as index funds, are designed to track the broad performance of the stock market via a specific market index. Data shows that, over the long term, such funds generally outperform those in which money managers actively pick stocks. Many index fund investors will get access to SpaceX within days or weeks following the IPO, experts said.
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The timeline depends on the specific criteria established by various index providers — and ranges from a few days to more than a year. For example, the Russell U.S. indexes can add mega-cap companies like SpaceX into their indexes after five days of trading, Evens said. The same timeline applies to indexes provided by FTSE, CRSP and MSCI, according to Vanguard Group. Here's what this means for investors: Those with shares in index mutual funds or ETFs that track these indexes, such as the Russell 1000 or CRSP U.S. Total Stock Market Index, will own a piece of SpaceX after that five-day period, Evens said. Morningstar owns CRSP Market Indexes. Examples of such funds include the iShares Russell 1000 ETF (IWB ) and the Vanguard Total Stock Market ETF (VTI ), Evens said.
"The inclusion of new entrants after the end of the fifth day of trading, rather than immediately on listing, should help address any immediate post-IPO share price volatility," according to an article by London Stock Exchange Group, which owns the FTSE and Russell indexes. Other index providers have adopted a slightly longer timeline. MSCI has a 10-day timeline, for example. Nasdaq adds a stock to the Nasdaq 100 index 15 trading days after its IPO if it is among the top 40 stocks, as SpaceX will be; otherwise, the timeline elongates to about three months.
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