SpaceX is one of the most popular pre-IPO stocks in the world. Millions of fans across the globe want to invest in SpaceX help Elon Musk and SpaceX reach his dream of getting to Mars.
However, you can’t just fire up Robinhood or Ameritrade and buy a few shares of SpaceX like you can Apple: SpaceX isn’t a publicly traded company. Elon Musk doesn’t seem to have any plans of making SpaceX public soon. He fears that once SpaceX is owned by profit-maximizing investors, it’ll reduce the chances that the company will be able to get to Mars.
How can you take part in SpaceX’s rise up then, both metaphorically and figuratively?
Option 1 (capital inefficient): Invest in companies or funds that hold private SpaceX shares.
The option that most other people give for taking part in SpaceX is to own a fund or company that owns some part of SpaceX. For example, Google.com owns some SpaceX share as part of its 2015 investment.
Sounds like a slam dunk right? Not really, when you consider that out of Google’s about $1+ trillion market cap, only $7 billion of that is SpaceX — less than 1%! In other words, for every $100 you put into Google, you own less than an dollar of SpaceX — not very capital efficient.
Likewise, you can own Scottish Mortgage Investment Trust (!) and they hold about <1% of SpaceX. Or you can look forward to the ARKX fund, which could own a piece of SpaceX, but might not own any SpaceX at all. Let’s face it: investing in a company whose value is <1% SpaceX is a poor choice.
Option 2 (if you’re an accredited investor, connected, and patient): Go for a private transaction.
If you’re an accredited investor (e.g. have more than $1 million in net worth), you might be able to own SpaceX stock directly. The US government grants exemptions to accredited investors to own stocks that are not publicly traded, including SpaceX.
But just because you are allowed to own SpaceX, it doesn’t mean it’ll be easy to own it. How do you actually get these shares? The answer is that you need to find your own direct counterparty. EquityZen might offer a solution, or you can try to find your own SpaceX seller by running ads.
Option 3 (if you own ETH or know cryptocurrencies): Buy the vSPACEX Token
This is the best solution if you know cryptocurrencies. You own a token on the blockchain that tracks the value of a SpaceX share until SpaceX IPOs. In case SpaceX does not IPO, the token will generally track the private transaction prices of SpaceX.
The vSPACEX token is backed by collateral (Ether) worth >=2x the value of SpaceX shares, which ensures that the vSPACEX tokens hold their value.
The advantages of vSPACEX then are:
- You are owning 100% SpaceX exposure. Not Google exposure and sure as not Scottish Mortgage Investment Trust.
- You don’t need to find a counter-party. vSPACEX is traded on an exchange that has shares available right now.
If don’t know how to use Metamask yet, follow this guide to get started. If you don’t know how to use Uniswap yet, this guide is excellent.
If you know how to use Uniswap already, you can buy vSPACEX in under 5 minutes through Uniswap here.