Matt Levine, Columnist

People Really Want SpaceX Shares

SPVs, insider trading on getting fired, Target Pride securities fraud, Riot Platforms and impersonating a stockbroker.

December 12, 2024 at 6:08 PM UTC

Matt Levine is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. A former investment banker at Goldman Sachs, he was a mergers and acquisitions lawyer at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz; a clerk for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit; and an editor of Dealbreaker.

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How much would you pay for stock in SpaceX or OpenAI? There are data points. SpaceX printed a trade recently at about a $350 billion valuation; OpenAI did one not long ago at $157 billion. If you are a big private-markets institutional investor and OpenAI or SpaceX calls you up and asks you to invest, you might take those valuations as a starting point.

But what if you’re not? What if you’re just some dentist, OpenAI and SpaceX aren’t calling you for a funding round, but you want to buy their stock? How much should you pay? Obviously more, is the short answer: Lots of dentists want OpenAI and SpaceX stock, and there isn’t very much available to them.