2 Stocks That Win No Matter What Happens to SpaceX After Its IPO

SpaceX’s IPO is priced at $135 per share and is expected to raise about $75 billion, making it one of the largest offerings in recent history. The article emphasizes uncertainty around post-listing performance, noting SpaceX is unprofitable while Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley are set to benefit from roughly 0.75% in fees, or about $500 million, plus underwriting economics tied to an $11 billion share option. Overall, the piece is a cautionary IPO commentary rather than a direct catalyst, with the clearest near-term beneficiaries being the lead banks.

Analysis

The immediate economic winner here is not the issuer but the underwriting complex: the fee pool is large enough to matter at the margin, but the more important second-order effect is balance-sheet optionality. The banks are not just taking advisory economics; if the deal performs, the greenshoe/over-allotment and affiliated facilitation can create a short-term inventory windfall, while if it weakens, the reputational benefit of having led the marquee deal still supports wallet share in follow-on mandates and private-market bridge financings. That makes this more of a franchise event than a one-day P&L event for GS/MS.

The market’s biggest mistake is likely assuming the IPO outcome cleanly transmits to the broad space ecosystem. In reality, a strong print can temporarily lift the entire private-space cohort via valuation anchoring and sentiment, but a weak first week would be more damaging because it could reset funding expectations for late-stage venture names and force a higher risk premium across capital-intensive frontier tech. That matters over weeks to months, not days: the real knock-on is tighter terms on pre-IPO rounds and more selective public-market multiples for adjacent AI/space hybrids.

From a positioning standpoint, the asymmetry favors expressing the event through the banks rather than trying to guess the debut. The main tail risk for GS/MS is not deal failure but a broader risk-off tape that compresses investment-banking beta and offsets the one-off fee bump. The contrarian read is that the market may be overestimating the durability of the halo: if the stock trades flat-to-down after a hyped deal, enthusiasm could reverse quickly and pressure any names trading on scarcity rather than fundamentals.

Key Decisions for Investors

• Long GS / MS into the IPO window, 1-4 weeks: buy on any pre-deal pullback and exit into the first 3-5 trading sessions after pricing; upside is modest but high-conviction on fee capture and franchise optics, with limited single-name downside unless the market turns sharply risk-off.
• Avoid chasing the IPO itself in the first week: if you want exposure, wait for post-lockup-style digestion even though this is not a lockup event; the risk/reward is poor when implied enthusiasm is already elevated and price discovery is thin.
• Relative-value pair: long GS vs short XLF for 2-6 weeks if the deal is viewed as a marquee franchise win; GS should outperform peers on incremental perception, while XLF dilutes that effect across lower-quality banking exposure.
• Tactical hedge: buy short-dated put spreads on a speculative space proxy basket for 2-8 weeks if the IPO opens strong; a failed halo could unwind quickly and hit adjacent private-market sentiment harder than the banks.
• If you need the cleanest event expression, use MS over BAC/C/JPM for a smaller but cleaner participation trade; GS is the primary beneficiary, while the others are more incremental and likely to underperform on fee contribution per unit of headline value.