SpaceX wealth effect's "blind box shareholders": Nesting dolls within dolls, who's swimming naked?

A couple of days ago, the Wall Street Journal ran a story about a hedge fund almost no one had heard of, named Darsana Capital.

Founded in 2014, this fund was relatively small. In 2019, it made a bet: invest in a rocket company that hadn't gone public yet. That year, SpaceX was valued at around $300 billion.

Seven years later, SpaceX is going public at a valuation of $1.75 trillion. The roughly $600 million Darsana invested over time is now worth approximately $15 billion. This bet is one of the most profitable single trades in Wall Street history. This one SpaceX position accounts for nearly 60% of Darsana's total assets.

SpaceX, the biggest IPO ever, is also the first shot in this year's wave of tech company listings. Stories like Darsana's are frequently in the news. Google's $900 million investment in 2015 is now worth over $100 billion. Founders Fund's $20 million lifeline in 2008 has ballooned to $19.5 billion.

But flip to other reports, and the picture is completely different.

In late March, Bloomberg and Reuters both reported on a strange situation: a group of investors bought SpaceX shares, but couldn't confirm whether they actually owned them. One of them, entrepreneur Tejpaul Bhatia, believed he held SpaceX stock, but had no way to verify the authenticity of the shares supposedly belonging to him.

On one hand, billion-dollar wealth-creation myths with pinpoint accuracy. On the other, people who can't even tell if they bought shares. The same company, the same IPO – why is there such a disconnect?

The Private Secondary Market Amidst "AI Anxiety"

Over the past two or three years, AI has pushed private market valuations to absurd heights.

Companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, and SpaceX are often valued in the hundreds of billions or even trillions of dollars, and they are still growing rapidly. Average investors look at these numbers and have only one thought: I want a piece of that.

There have never been so many people wanting to get in on the action. The problem is, these companies aren't public. For ordinary people, finding a way to buy in before the IPO is nearly impossible.

Just look at the list of SpaceX shareholders. Large institutions and strategic investors hold tens of billions or even hundreds of billions in shares. Alphabet, Google's parent company, alone holds over $100 billion. In contrast, all the publicly available channels – a few ETFs and funds that hold SpaceX – offer a combined exposure of only about $1 billion.

Based on a $2 trillion valuation, how much could SpaceX investors make?

Moreover, most avenues are off-limits to ordinary people. Most private market channels are open only to accredited investors. In the US, this means having an annual income over $200,000 or net worth exceeding $1 million (excluding your primary residence). Those who don't meet this threshold can't even squeeze through the tiny $1 billion opening.

For anything else, such a disparity would be enough to make people back off. But the logic of FOMO works in reverse. The more scarce something is, and the more you see others profiting, the more you want to get in.

The money didn't retreat. It flooded into a place called the private secondary market.

This market specializes in buying and selling shares of private companies. Early investors and employees wanting to cash out, and those who missed the early boat wanting to get in, are connected by the platforms, funds, and various vehicles that facilitate these transactions.

In recent years, it has ballooned beyond belief. Its size has tripled since 2019. Annual trading volume reached approximately $162 billion in 2024, grew to around $230 billion in 2025, and is expected to hit $250 billion in 2026. The number of companies willing to open their shares for secondary transfers went from 12 to 31 in just one year.

Money poured in, and sellers of SpaceX shares poured out.

How many poured out? According to the New York Times, there are at least 170 Special Purpose Vehicles (SPVs) that have bought SpaceX shares. An SPV is a shell. Someone manages to get a bit of SpaceX stock, puts it into the shell, and then sells shares of the shell to later investors. 170 shells, all circling the same company.

These shells come from all sorts of backgrounds.

In October 2025, an institution called Witz Ventures launched an SPV named The Cashmere Fund on the fundraising platform Republic. This shell bundled together the three hottest targets – xAI, SpaceX, and Perplexity – and sold them to retail investors. About 150 listeners of the personal finance podcast Rich Habits managed to jump the queue into SpaceX through a group buy. Rapper 2 Chainz and SkyBridge founder Anthony Scaramucci have both publicly claimed to hold SpaceX shares.

Retired NBA player Tristan Thompson said on a show that he invested in SpaceX when it was valued at $300 billion.

The problem is that this flood of middlemen is a mixed bag.

One institution, Vika Ventures, collected $5.9 million from investors, promising to buy SpaceX shares. It was later discovered that the founder used the money for luxury watches and private jets. In 2023, another financial broker was sentenced to eight years for defrauding over 50 investors of nearly $6 million, also selling pre-IPO shares including SpaceX.

Another once-popular platform, Linqto, which focused on star targets like SpaceX, went bankrupt in 2025. The SEC is investigating whether it properly verified users' accredited investor status, affecting over 13,000 investors.

Even if you don't run into a scammer, the situation isn't necessarily clear.

DataPower Capital is an institution dealing in SpaceX shares. Its founder, David Yakobovitch, told the New York Times that he only accepts deals that are one layer removed from SpaceX. "Once you get a few more layers down," he said, "things start to get muddy."

Nested Five Layers Deep

Let's go back to those 150 podcast listeners of Rich Habits. They didn't buy SpaceX.

They bought into Witz Ventures, and Witz Ventures bought shares of DataPower Capital. DataPower is the one that actually gets the stock directly from a registered SpaceX shareholder. In other words, an ordinary person placing an order after hearing a podcast is separated from the actual SpaceX stock by at least two or three layers of shells.

With each additional layer, two things happen simultaneously.

First, the money shrinks. Independent developer levelsio calculated online: Suppose you invest $100,000 in SpaceX through three layers of SPVs. The outermost layer charges a 6% setup fee, and the inner layers each take management fees and performance splits. The amount of money that actually reaches the bottom layer for SpaceX is only about $69,000. Before you've even started earning, 30% is already gone.

Second, the truth gets farther away. This SPV structure has a critical flaw: investors at each layer can only see the layer directly above them. You buy the outermost shell, and its manager tells you it holds shares of the next shell. Is that next layer real? Is there actual SpaceX stock at the bottom? You can't see it, and you have no right to verify it.

Among the 170 shells, the deepest nesting goes to five layers. This is why Bhatia couldn't confirm his holdings. It wasn't because he wasn't diligent enough; the system is designed precisely to keep outsiders from seeing inside.

Why could the SpaceX nesting doll go so deep?

It comes down to how long it has been in the private market. Founded in 2002 and going public in 2026, it was private for a full 24 years.

What does 24 years mean? The average tech company going public in 1999 was only 4 years old. The batch in 2014 averaged 11 years. In recent years, the median age of US companies at IPO has stretched to 14 years. SpaceX's 24 years is an extreme case on an already lengthening curve.

The longer a company stays in the private market, the more years its stock gets traded, transferred, and re-shelled. SpaceX shares have been circulating over-the-counter for over two decades, accumulating layer upon layer of shells.

The lengthening private period isn't just a SpaceX phenomenon.

The median age of US companies at IPO has risen from 6 years in 1980 to 13.5 years in 2024. The reason isn't complicated: there's just too much money in the private market.

As of 2023, global venture capital firms still held over $650 billion in dry powder. Companies aren't short on funding, so they naturally aren't in a hurry to go public and face the earnings pressure and regulatory scrutiny of the public markets. Consequently, the number of unicorns (companies valued over $1 billion) keeps accumulating, with over 1,500 globally now worth a combined $6 trillion. Most haven't raised a round based on public valuations in over three years.

The longer a company stays private, the longer its employees' and early investors' stock remains locked up. For these people looking to cash out, the secondary market is the only exit. This demand piles up, and SPVs emerge in droves to meet it.

At the peak of the venture capital boom in 2021, the number of new SPVs established in the US surged 235% year-over-year. By Q3 2024, there were over 2,400 identifiable, operational SPVs. When a tool is used so massively and repeatedly over 20+ years, nesting dolls reaching five layers deep is almost inevitable.

And SpaceX happens to be the company that controls its stock most tightly in the entire private market. Externally, SpaceX exercises its right of first refusal on almost every share transfer, intercepting potential sales. It does share buybacks every six months, purchasing employee shares to bring them back under its control.

The tighter the door is welded shut, the higher the price of tickets outside it.

SpaceX's own pricing was clear: a buyback in July 2025 corresponded to a $400 billion valuation, doubling to $800 billion in December six months later. But the secondary market quotes were already far ahead. The Forge platform showed ~$1.23 trillion, Hiive showed $1.45 trillion, and the crypto exchange Hyperliquid listed contracts corresponding to over $2 trillion – even higher than SpaceX's own target for its IPO valuation.

Another tangled mess came from mergers. In March 2025, Musk merged X (formerly Twitter) into his AI company, xAI. In February 2026, SpaceX acquired xAI entirely. Those who had bought Twitter or xAI shares, along with the entire set of shells behind them, were all connected to SpaceX's register through two rounds of stock swaps.

Opening a Mystery Box

When it reaches this point, even the companies themselves get nervous.

In May 2026, Anthropic and OpenAI both issued public statements, clearly informing the market that any share transfers not approved by the board are invalid and will not be recorded on the company's books. They named names, listing eight platforms including Forge and Hiive as unauthorized. Upon the announcement, related tokens on-chain in the pre-IPO secondary market immediately crashed, falling 30-40% in a single day.

This kind of announcement targeting secondary market trading isn't just a spur-of-the-moment decision by one or two companies.

Previously, the robotics company Figure AI, when it was reported at a $39.5 billion valuation, also moved to block secondary trading of its shares. Almost all the hottest targets in the private market – Anthropic, SpaceX, Anduril, Stripe, Databricks – are doing the same thing: dialing their tolerance for secondary trading down to zero.

Why the collective backlash?

This touches on a rarely noticed IPO "red line." Under US rules, if a company has more than 2,000 shareholders, it must regularly disclose its finances just like a public company, even if it hasn't gone public. The nested SPV structure makes it impossible for the company to know exactly how many shareholders it has. One SPV might count as just one entity on the register, but it could represent hundreds of people behind it. If a company unknowingly crosses the 2,000-shareholder line, it's forced to open its books.

Another reason is related to pricing employee stock options. If a company's shares are freely traded in the secondary market and driven to high prices, the company can't ignore that number when setting the strike price for employee options. The crazier the secondary market, the less valuable the employees' options become.

More critically, there's the issue of information. Shareholders have a legal right to access company operating information. For AI companies, model architecture, training data, and compute arrangements are the most sensitive secrets they must protect. When a company can't even count its own shareholders, it can't tell who this information is flowing to.

Cleaning up the countless shareholders, protecting option pricing, and closing information leaks – none of these issues is new on its own. But when the secondary market balloons to $230 billion and nesting dolls reach five layers, companies find they can no longer handle it privately. So they step up to the stage and turn the statement "your shares are invalid" into a public announcement for the first time. SpaceX didn't follow with a similar statement, but its right of first refusal essentially does the same thing.

This declaration of "invalid" by the companies leaves those multi-layered shells hanging in mid-air. You bought an SPV, you paid your money. As for whether the underlying SpaceX stock at the bottom was approved and is legitimate, no one can give you an answer until the company publicly reconciles its books.

So buying a SpaceX SPV is increasingly like opening a mystery box.

The date for opening the box is fixed. When SpaceX rings the bell on the Nasdaq on June 12th, its IPO filing will, for the first time, include a public, verifiable shareholder register. Every single layer of shell wrapped around its stock over the past 20-plus years will have to be reconciled at that moment. If it matches, the box contains real stock. If it doesn't, it's a worthless piece of paper. On that day, Bhatia will find out which kind he drew.

But after SpaceX, there's OpenAI, then Anthropic, and a long list of others waiting in line. Just scroll through your social media feed, and you'll see posts about "proxy investment" opportunities for these hottest AI companies.

The hot money created by AI in recent years has nowhere to go. The truly worthwhile targets are few and all tightly locked. Too much money, too narrow a door – and countless shells grow in the middle.

As long as this imbalance persists, the private secondary market will remain as it is now: a mystery box that everyone wants to play, but no one can really say what they've drawn.