Elon Musk denies rumors of icing out Vlad Tenev’s Robinhood and Tony Noto’s SoFi in SpaceX IPO

Elon Musk on Tuesday came out and shut down talk that SpaceX plans to leave Vlad Tenev’s Robinhood and Tony Noto’s SoFi out of its IPO.

The debunkment came after the dumb money community started bombarding Elon on X, thinking they were getting locked out of the biggest Wall Street debut ever, since Robinhood is the biggest trading app for these nerds.

That fear picked up after Cryptopolitan had reported that Morgan Stanley’s E*Trade was in talks to handle sales of SpaceX shares to small U.S. investors, while all retail investors were promised 30% of SpaceX, which is far higher than the usual 5% to 10% range seen in most IPOs.

After users started asking Elon to include Robinhood, Elon said the rumors were false, and that he and Vlad are “talking about it.”

Meanwhile, analysts have predicted that the IPO could raise about $75 billion and value SpaceX near $1.75 trillion, which is why every detail about access is getting attention.

SpaceX builds a massive bank group to handle global investor demand in blockbuster IPO

SpaceX is also building a large group of banks to run the IPO. At least 21 banks are working on the deal as of Tuesday. This is one of the biggest underwriting groups seen in recent years. The listing is being handled under the internal name Project Apex and is expected to happen in June.

Five banks are leading the process as main bookrunners for SpaceX in this IPO, according to Reuters. These are Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, and Citigroup. Alongside them, 16 more banks have joined in smaller roles. About half of these names had not been publicly linked to the deal before.

The additional banks include Allen & Co, Barclays, BTG Pactual, Deutsche Bank, ING Groep, Macquarie, Mizuho, Needham & Co, Raymond James, Royal Bank of Canada, Societe Generale, Banco Santander, Stifel, UBS, Wells Fargo, and William Blair.

Each bank is expected to focus on different parts of the offering. Some will handle big institutional money. Others will deal with wealthy clients. Some will focus on retail investors and different regions around the world. The setup is not final yet and more banks could still be added.

Large IPO groups like this are not new for deals of this size. Arm Holdings worked with close to 30 banks when it went public in 2023. Alibaba also used a very large group during its 2014 listing, which still stands as one of the biggest IPOs ever recorded.

“Some SpaceX investors worry whether they actually hold the company’s stock, which has been sold through the opaque secondary market for private ​company shares,” said Reuters.

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