The long-awaited stock market debut of SpaceX, Elon Musk’s rocket company, was confirmed with the filing of confidential initial public offering (IPO) documents this week. It may have been chosen for the start of a new quarter, while also resonating culturally with the launch of the Artemis II mission

That is contemporary investing culture all over: world-changing innovation shot through memes and humour. Since the pandemic-era surge in retail trading platforms such as Robinhood, stock-picking has fused with online culture — setting the stage for a $1 trillion SpaceX IPO to ignite a new market hype cycle. The question is whether individual investors will genuinely share in the upside of one of the world’s largest private companies, or end up left holding the bag.

Back in 2021, the so-called meme stock craze set the tone for the financial markets of the 2020s. A tussle between Redditors and hedge funds over shares in the US retailer GameStop exemplified the moment, which framed itself as a championing of the individual investor versus the Wall Street system. While GameStop’s price went back down after the initial craze, the power of the retail investor was demonstrated.

That period of stock hype coincided with the last big cycle of space-related companies coming to the market. Several of these, though, led to poor results. Astra Space Inc. was taken private in 2024 when shares had shed 99% of their value since a 2021 listing. An earlier entrant, Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic, was valued at $2.4 billion when it went public in 2019. It is now worth a little over $200 million.

It wouldn’t be totally fair to compare SpaceX to those failed launches. Both of these were special purpose acquisition companies (SPACs), a kind of reverse acquisition vehicle that made it easier for businesses to go public, but which proved to be its own bubble. Yet they illustrated the challenge of delivering on one’s promises in a capital-intensive, highly regulated industry.

In fact, the SpaceX listing has all the makings of a possible boom-and-bust hype cycle. Its sensitivity to a possible AI bubble, the propensity for retail investors to get overexcited about space, and the involvement of Musk himself make for a volatile combination.

Musk’s AI lab xAI became a subsidiary of SpaceX in February. That makes this IPO an unusual referendum not just for investor confidence in not just space exploration, but in AI. OpenAI and Anthropic are also expected to go public at massive valuations this year or early next. It’s reasonable then to expect an AI share-buying bonanza. But any of those could turn sour if the AI bubble bursts, or if it becomes clear that one of the big companies is pulling away from the rest.

Then there is Musk himself. No other executive wields a similarly market-moving persona. In their recent book Muskism, Ben Tarnoff and Quinn Slobodian describe his relationship to the internet and financial markets as a form of “troll capitalism”: so deeply embedded in the meme-ecosystem that a single post can move millions, whether in Tesla stock or Dogecoin. That influence derives not only from his record of achievement, but from his ability to participate in the hype cycle as a peer rather than a distant figure. “Unlike traditional corporate titans, Musk does not simply speak at the internet; he speaks with it,” they observe. It is a powerful publicity engine, but one that leaves shareholders exposed to his whims and, at times, his volatility.

Shares in Tesla, something of the ur-memestock when it went public in 2010, have risen by more than 2,000% since then. Amateur investors siphoning off their savings into SpaceX stock will be hoping for something similar, or even better.

All this sets the stage for a return to some of the frenzy we saw at the start of the decade. Retail platforms are currently tussling for their portion of fresh SpaceX shares. Other space-related companies are getting a boost off the back of the announcement alone. On prediction markets like Polymarket, punters are already taking meta-bets on the company’s stock price. Once OpenAI and Anthropic join the party, the hype could reach stratospheric proportions. But like a rocket launch, there are several points of failure, and it only takes one of them for the whole thing to come crashing down.