How regular rich people are buying into SpaceX

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A few years ago, the closest most people could get to a buzzy, private company like SpaceX was reading about it in the news.

Not anymore. In 2026, there are more ways in, and George got tired of just reading about it.

"I like tech, I like space," he said.

The Los Angeles-based entertainment professional, who asked to use a pseudonym, put $150,000 into a SpaceX special purpose vehicle (SPV) on Hiive, a marketplace that sells accredited investors access to private companies. He added $45,000 into xAI, which later got folded into the SpaceX position. By the start of July, the stake was worth $750,000. It's still locked up, with Hiive telling him they're still working out when that ends.

George doesn't have a finance background but said the money he put in was money he could lose if the investments didn’t work out. He said so far it feels like he got lucky with the two bets he made, in a corner of the market that still doesn't have much oversight.

"It's definitely something you have to be cautious of," he said.

Wall Street's velvet rope is fraying

Not long ago, this kind of access required already being rich, or already knowing someone, the kind of connections that got you a call with a company's CEO or CFO. Now a small industry of marketplaces, Hiive, Forge, and EquityZen among them, will sell an accredited investor a slice of a private company for a fee, no rolodex required.

The shares themselves usually come from people who already have them and want cash, usually employees sitting on paper wealth they can't yet spend, or early investors looking to exit before a company goes public. 

A marketplace will often bundle that stake into an SPV, a separate entity that holds the shares so several buyers can each own a piece of it. Sometimes the company signs off on the sale. Sometimes it finds out only after the fact.

To qualify as accredited, an investor generally needs $1 million in net worth or $200,000 in annual income. That bar covers a lot more people than it used to: about 18.5% of U.S. households qualified as accredited investors in 2022, up from roughly 1.8% in 1983, according to the SEC.

Wall Street has taken notice. Charles Schwab $SCHW bought Forge this year. Morgan Stanley $MS bought EquityZen.

Part of why this market exists is that companies don't need to go public to raise real money anymore. OpenAI's $40 billion round in 2025, the biggest private placement at the time, went to fewer than 50 investors, according to the Wall Street Journal. That record was then dwarfed by a $122 billion round by OpenAI this March.

The number of public companies on U.S. exchanges has been cut roughly in half since the late 1990s. Companies now wait a median of 13 years to go public, up from six in 2000, and by then, with more of the value they'll ever create having already gone to whoever got in early.

Washington wants to widen the opening further. In April, President Trump signed an executive order making it easier for 401(k) plans to hold private investments, an early step toward inviting retirement savers into the same club George and his friends found other ways into.

SEC chair Paul Atkins, who's pushed to loosen the accredited-investor rules that keep most people out, has framed it as fairness. He's been photographed under a sign reading "Make IPOs Great Again."

For decades, private investing was "an access class, not an asset class," said Logan Henderson of Gridline, which builds due-diligence software that helps financial advisors vet private deals for clients. Now the barrier's coming down, and Henderson said he mostly welcomes it, so long as investors get real disclosure and education along with the access.

What worries him is what people actually understand about what they've bought. Stock isn't just stock. Some come with more say in the company and a bigger claim if things go wrong; some come with strings attached, like a rule saying you can't resell it without the company's permission.

Most buyers never ask which kind they're getting, he said. Anthropic recently voided a batch of investments it said it never approved, his go-to example of the risk being real.

He's just as pointed about fees. Some of these deals get resold two or three times over, and each layer takes its own cut, typically 5% to 10% off the top plus 20% to 30% of any eventual profit, stacked on top of what an investor already paid to get in.

A normal fund charges something similar, he said, but that fee is supposed to cover years of active management, not a single introduction.

Caveat emptor, cha-ching

Two decades of expanding SEC exemptions are behind that, said Benjamin Schiffrin, director of securities policy at Better Markets. Companies can now raise money privately without the disclosure that comes with a public offering, and private markets raise more money than public ones do as a result.

Nudging ordinary savers toward assets regulators themselves admit are illiquid and opaque isn't fixing that. "That can't be the answer," he said. A brand-name broker doesn't change the math either. Investing in an opaque asset through a trusted platform, he said, "is just as risky."

There are already examples of things going wrong. Linqto marketed shares in Ripple, SpaceX, and Anthropic to smaller investors, marking them up by as much as 60%. An internal probe later found its customers never actually owned the securities. 

The firm has since gone bankrupt, and the SEC is investigating. A court-approved plan finalized earlier this year gives its customers, some of whom had put in $500,000 or more, a shot at recovering roughly 95% of their investments' value, through either a liquidating trust or a publicly traded closed-end fund.

Rules like these tend to catch up eventually, once a market gets too big to ignore. In the meantime, there will be losers. But likely winners, too.

A Reddit $RDDT user posting as KonyayJWest put $450,000 into SpaceX through Hiive last spring, about 18,000 shares. He works in banking, which he said wasn’t necessary to understand the process. "The onboarding was pretty straightforward, just verification, some paperwork, and a wire transfer," he said. What actually took getting used to was the SPV structure itself, and the idea that the money might never be touchable again.

The stake peaked at $3.8 million and sits closer to $2.8 million now. It's still locked up, and there's no guarantee it stays worth what it's worth today, but by his own math, it already moved his retirement up by 15 years.

SpaceX's IPO reportedly minted 4,400 new millionaires, mostly current and former employees. KonyayJWest isn't one of them, he found his own way in from the outside, but the math worked out about the same. He's still waiting to find out exactly how well.

"I am deeply looking forward to the lockup period ending," he said.