SpaceX IPO crowd proves compute bets, not rockets, can drive a $300 million hold

Friday morning outside the Nasdaq looked less like an IPO and more like a theme park for people who think the next decade will be decided by compute. Hemanth Golla, a 22-year-old Hong Kong prop trader in the crowd named as George Manchin, said he put in for “a little bit” of SpaceX stock, comparing it to “like a car, but it’s gonna be more than a car now.” Just behind the inflatable optimism was the other side of the same trade. Hemanth Golla, an early investor through his venture fund High Circle Capital, is sitting on $300 million worth, and he told Fortune at the scene outside Nasdaq in Manhattan that it’s “very exciting,” not just monetarily, but because it is a “historic moment.”

That pairing matters for executives because it frames what this IPO is really functioning as, at least on the sidewalk. The SpaceX IPO, described as the biggest in history, arrived as a rare market event that turned into a tourist attraction. And the mood around the building captured the AI-era consensus: people may say it is overvalued, but they do not necessarily behave like it is. Jasper Howard, a 19-year-old who calls himself the “Clavicular of Crypto,” told Fortune he knows “everyone” understands the valuation is overvalued, and then asked, “but do they care?” His answer was basically that time horizon beats entry price for the kinds of buyers this moment attracts. “We know in 10 years, space exploration is gonna be this huge thing,” Howard said. “AI is gonna be this huge thing.” In his view, the near-term math “doesn’t really matter right now if it’s overvalued,” because “in the future it will be fairly valued.”

If you are trying to understand what decision-makers should watch, listen to what Golla and Manchin pointed to instead of Mars dreams. Golla did not lean on an interplanetary narrative when Fortune asked what pushes a valued-at-$1.77-trillion company higher. He pointed to compute capacity deals with Anthropic and Google. By his account, they were worth “$20, $30 billion in the last couple of months.” From there, his bet turned into a scaling plan: he predicted SpaceX builds another three or four data centers within a year, and he argued that “that’s going to increase the revenue by another five times or 10 times.” The message is blunt: in this market, compute is the engine, and rockets are the branding cover.

Manchin made the same logic with a shorter sentence. “Nobody but xAI has computing power,” he said, and added, “and if you’re gonna find computing power right now, I’ll buy it.” The sidewalk looked like a mash-up of retail traders, media passersby, and AI loyalists in costume. There were more than two people in astronaut outfits bouncing between different press interviews, and there were teenage “retired crypto traders” with hired cameramen talking about the IPO. The theater is not the point. The point is that the theater is powered by a very specific economic story, one where compute capacity and data-center build-outs are treated as the monetizable bottleneck.

Not everyone around the crowd fully bought the timing. Some people told Fortune they did not understand why the IPO was happening when it did, and described the idea of “exit liquidity,” where the function of new buyers is to let earlier investors sell. That concept becomes concrete when you look at lockup schedules. Golla could recite his lockup calendar from memory. He said lockup restrictions start loosening 45 to 60 days out, with roughly 20% at the first earnings report, then staged tranches after that. He said everything becomes unrestricted by day 180. Even with that roadmap, he said he is holding. “We are looking at very long, I mean, like, a three- to four-year period,” Golla told Fortune. “So I think it’s all going to play out well.”

What’s also striking is the way the headline names “biggest in history” yet the surrounding market looks like a queue with other megadeals looming. Fortune wrote that the IPO is pricing $75 billion in stock into a market that is also expected to absorb an Anthropic IPO and, eventually, an OpenAI one. Either the money keeps coming, or the buyers who are going to buy have already bought. At the time of writing, it was trading at just over $170 a share. For boards and finance leaders across tech, that is a reminder that these events are not isolated corporate milestones. They are liquidity cycles where multiple narratives compete for the same risk appetite, and valuations can be reinforced or corrected depending on whether capital has anywhere else to go.

The crowd thinned by late morning, which is often when reality starts replacing cosplay. Zeke Spector had bought an astronaut costume in Midtown and paid FedEx $170 to print and bind the full S-1. He was already planning his next outfit for the Anthropic listing, asking, “Do I dress up like a data center? Like a refrigerator?” The bit, like the market, must keep going. Even the skeptics seem to treat this as a long-running series. “This is history,” Spector said, “whether you like it or not.” A few blocks away, the other kind of crowd showed up. Outside JPMorgan Chase’s headquarters on Park Avenue, about two dozen protesters held a small demonstration complete with a 30-foot banner decrying Musk’s new trillionaire status. A protester announced they were outside the JPMorgan corporate headquarters “where they’re about to host a lavish party for Elon Musk,” and others chanted, “Shame, shame, shame.”

For executives, the practical takeaway is not whether costumes are fun. It is what the participants chose to talk about: compute capacity deals, data-center scaling, lockup mechanics, and a time horizon long enough to shrug at overvaluation. In the AI market, pricing can move faster than strategy documents, but strategy still shows up in what people actually underwrite. If you are on a board, running finance, or investing in growth, this moment is a live case study in how the market is translating compute partnerships into revenue expectations, and how early holders decide whether to monetize along the way or stay in for the next three to four years.