MW This Big Tech investor's warning for traders: Watch out for the SpaceX IPO
By Barbara Kollmeyer
SpaceX signage is displayed outside a Space Exploration Technologies Corp. facility in Hawthorne, Calif., on March 26, 2026. SpaceX has investors excited, but some seasoned tech investors are worried.
At a small gathering of some major tech investors, the message was clear for retail investors: Take great care with SpaceX and other massive IPOs ahead.
While there are moments when private markets are overvalued versus public ones and vice versa, "right now, everything in the world of tech is pretty fully valued," Brad Gerstner, CEO of Altimeter Capital, a Silicon Valley tech investor that manages over $18 billion in assets, told the All-In podcast on Sunday, alongside Gavin Baker, chief investment officer of Atreides Management and others.
"You can't have the parabolic moves we've had and think that everything is cheap. That's not to say that we're not going to go higher, but when you've been punched in the face as many times as all of us have over the last 15 years in technology, we know it's a jagged line up into the right," he said.
The Nasdaq Composite COMP slumped 1,121.53 points on Friday, its biggest one-day point decline on record. That came amid surging Treasury yields, following stronger-than-expected May jobs data, which had traders pricing in a bigger chance of an interest-rate hike by the Federal Reserve this year. The tech index remains up 10% this year, and futures (NQ00) pointed to a rebound on Monday.
As for retail investors, they just need "staying power," Gerstner said. "If you're going to launch a product, as long as the retail investor can stay in that product through the drawdown, they're going to do fine. The problem is most of them YOLO at the top, because everyone gets them all jimmied up and excited," he said.
YOLO - or you only live once - is an acronym that refers to investors making sizable bets over a short time, and is viewed as a risky trade strategy by many.
Gerstner expressed concerns that investors are "layering up" right now, noting that "there are 14 exchange-traded funds launching on the day of the SpaceX IPO," some of which are aimed at levering returns. SpaceX $(SPCX)$ is seeking to raise $75 billion at a fixed price of $135 per share for its June 12 initial public offering.
Read: Can SpaceX live up to Wall Street's multitrillion-dollar hype?
REX Shares and Tuttle ?Capital Management filed in March to launch the T-Rex 2X Long SpaceX Daily Target ETF and T-Rex 2x Long Anthropic Daily Target ETFs, which aim to amplify by 200% the daily performance of those stocks once they are publicly traded. But those losses can be equally magnified on the way down.
Defiance ETFs last month launched the Defiance Daily Target 2X Long XOVR ETF XOVL, a blend of entrepreneurial U.S. public companies and select late-stage private companies, such as SpaceX. But the company also appeared to file for a three-times leveraged ETF.
"We may not be at the top, but we ain't at the bottom," Gerstner said.
-Barbara Kollmeyer
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(END) Dow Jones Newswires
June 08, 2026 09:16 ET (13:16 GMT)
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