Since the SpaceX IPO filing landed with a $1.77 trillion valuation and a June 12 Nasdaq debut target, the story has moved well beyond the headline numbers — and the parts the financial press keeps glossing over deserve a hard look.

Coinbase Wants to Sell You SpaceX Before It Goes Public

On Thursday, Coinbase unveiled what it calls the SpaceX Pre-IPO Perp — a perpetual futures contract settled in USDC stablecoin that tracks SpaceX's private-market valuation. According to CNBC, the product is available only to traders outside the United States. Coinbase's head of derivatives Liz Martin called it "a new asset class, built for this era of markets."

Binance got there first, launching its own SpaceX pre-IPO perps last month, per CNBC.

What this actually is: you're not buying SpaceX. You're buying a leveraged derivative tied to what the market thinks SpaceX is worth, with no expiration date, settling in a stablecoin. Perps already account for over 70% of all centralized global crypto exchange volume, according to CoinGecko. This is speculation layered on top of speculation — before the company has even traded a single public share.

The fact that this is blocked for U.S. retail investors is the tell. Regulators here won't allow it. That doesn't make it inherently wrong, but retail traders abroad should understand exactly what they're buying.

ARK's Bull Case: Starlink Is the Real Business

Brett Winton, chief futurist at ARK Invest, went on CNBC's Squawk Box Thursday and made a compelling argument that most IPO coverage is whiffing on. The rockets, he said, are NOT the primary valuation driver. Starlink is.

According to Winton, Starlink currently delivers roughly 500 terabits per second of bandwidth and generates about $13 billion in annual revenue. SpaceX's total 2024 revenue was $18.67 billion, per CNBC — meaning Starlink is already the dominant revenue engine.

Winton told CNBC that each Starship launch can add 60 terabits per second of satellite capacity. Ten launches doubles current capacity. "We think they can do hundreds of launches and get into the hundreds of billions of dollars of Starlink revenue," Winton said.

ARK Venture Fund already has SpaceX as its largest single holding at 11.4% of assets, per CNBC. The fund is up roughly 70% over the past 12 months. ARK has skin in this game — that's not a disclaimer, it's context. Their bull case isn't random cheerleading; it's a position they've held and profited from.

ARK's $2 trillion valuation thesis for Starlink alone would put SpaceX's $1.77 trillion IPO price at a discount to just one division of the company. That's either a profound insight or extraordinary cope. Probably worth knowing which before you hit buy.

The Governance Problem Nobody on Wall Street Wants to Say Out Loud

This is what most financial coverage is actively avoiding.

Nilay Patel at The Verge hosted NYT tech reporter Ryan Mac on the Decoder podcast Thursday, and Mac — coauthor of Character Limit: How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter — laid out the problem directly: rules about shareholder control, index fund inclusion, and standard market accountability mechanisms are being bent, if not broken, to accommodate this offering.

Musk will hold over 82% voting control of SpaceX after the IPO, per the company's own filing. Investors buying in get almost zero say in how the company is run. That's not unusual for tech founders — but the scale here is extraordinary for a company at this valuation.

Major institutional fund managers are reportedly staying quiet about these governance issues because they cannot afford to miss the trade. That's FOMO overriding fiduciary duty.

The Musk lock-up deserves attention. He cannot sell shares for 366 days after the IPO. After that, per the filing, he is under "no obligation to maintain his ownership interest" and "may elect at any time thereafter to sell all or a substantial portion" of his stake. Day 367 is a date every SpaceX shareholder should have circled.

The EchoStar Play: SpaceX Hype Has Spilled Into Mid-Cap Stocks

For traders who can't get IPO allocation, options volume in EchoStar (SATS) surged to more than three times its daily average on Wednesday, according to CNBC. EchoStar owns an estimated 3% of SpaceX stock, acquired through a wireless spectrum deal with Starlink in September. The stock is up 650% in the past year.

Over 60,000 options contracts traded for nearly $50 million in total premium in a single session. About five times as many calls traded as puts, per CNBC's ThinkOrSwim data.

SpaceX IPO hype is cascading through the rest of the market. It's not rational price discovery — it's contagion.

What This Means for Regular People

If you're a retail investor in the U.S., you're getting SpaceX shares only after institutions, insiders, and international derivatives traders have already positioned. The Nasdaq debut is June 12. By then, the price will reflect all of the above.

The company is real. The technology is real. Starlink's revenue growth is real. But $1.77 trillion is not a price — it's a bet on decades of execution by a man who simultaneously runs Tesla, xAI, X, and The Boring Company, and who will control 82% of the votes no matter what you think.

Eyes open.