Elon Musk may be about to become a trillionaire.
Many of the people who work for him at SpaceX are about to hit seven-figure jackpots — or more — via the company’s initial public offering.
And individual investors are lining up for a chance to buy shares for the $135 opening price. There are so many of them that some brokerage firms are, in effect, running a lottery for $135 tickets.
Do you have fear of missing out? That’s natural, maybe inevitable. But this is a fine time to remind yourself that you can in fact win if you don’t play this week. JOMO, the joy of missing out, is a reasonable alternative to FOMO.
SoFi, one of the brokerage firms whose customers can try to participate in the I.P.O., offers varying perspectives on the question of whether to do so. In 2024, it used words like “exciting” and “empower” in a release describing its efforts to give some investors indirect access to SpaceX via so-called private-market funds. In 2025, it ran an article with the headline “How to Avoid FOMO Trading.”
Some people who choose to dive in could execute a perfect flip by buying at $135 and immediately selling for a much higher price (if they aren’t subject to so-called lockup periods and don’t mind any penalty that a brokerage might threaten in order to keep too many people from selling so quickly). They’ll need to bet a lot to win a lot.
Buy-and-hold investors may not be so lucky, depending on how long they hang on. As my colleague Jeff Sommer wrote recently, the price-to-sales ratio for SpaceX (a measure of a stock’s price in relation to its annual sales) is incredibly high. Morningstar values the stock at $63. If its analysts are correct or even close, there will be no reason to lament missing out on buying SpaceX at $135.
As for the SpaceX employees and early-stage investors, think twice before you envy them. After all, they’re betting on Mr. Musk, who has been erratic, distracted and frequently destructive while also making lots of money for Tesla shareholders who got in at the right time.
His employees may also love the work they do, and much of it — satellite internet and space exploration — is useful, cool and off-the-charts innovative. But the ones who are about to get wealthier have probably been slogging away for a while.
“There is a lot of slow, boring work that leads to something this exciting,” said Milo Benningfield, a veteran financial planner in San Francisco who has had a front-row seat for many technology market cycles. Any moment like this one, he added, is an opportunity to ask yourself fundamental questions about your day job. “What would you enjoy doing along the way and appreciating for its own sake?”
In the mid-aughts, Katy Song saw the stock-market boom, and the beginning of the bust, up close as a software and semiconductor banker in San Francisco. She pivoted to financial planning with an office just north of the city, and her clients are a mix of employees at companies that will or could go public soon and young families just trying to pay for preschool or afford a house.
The latter group gets a basic budget and a specific question.
“I show them their goals and put price tags on those goals,” Ms. Song said. “In none of these cases is someone going to sell 100 percent of their rollover I.R.A. and buy SpaceX.”
Now, her query: “When you said you wanted security and safety, do you think investing directly in SpaceX is going to feel that way?” They can usually answer that one for themselves.
Not everyone has safety and security as a goal, younger people in particular. And gambling can be fun, if you have money you can afford to lose and don’t get addicted. If you’re in that category, chances are you won’t have the opportunity to buy many I.P.O. shares anyway, and direct exposure to SpaceX won’t mess with your ability to meet your long-term financial goals.
Other people had their own goals before SpaceX scheduled its offering, and nothing about this week’s spectacle is likely to change those. That said, any envy right now is a fine prompt to revisit your medium- and long-term aims.
Then, ask yourself one more question: What have you won already? You probably have a decent-size list.
A few things come to mind for me.
I’ve spent 32 years saving as much as I reasonably could and taking whatever the market would give me in index funds or similar investments, and it has worked so far.
Members of my immediate family have run the cancer gantlet six times without dying of the disease.
I’ve gotten to write this column for 18 years without boredom or termination.
Congratulations to the SpaceX welders and mariners and coders. Hats off and good luck to the individual investors who will play the lottery on Friday.
But I’m rooting especially hard for the JOMO crowd. I’ll be turning off the television on Friday and eating some ice cream.
