WEALTH July 4, 2026 0 Comments

Is SpaceX’s Secret Share Strategy About to Shake the Market and Rewrite the Rules of Investment?

Picture this: My mate in Dublin used to date this sharp American woman back in the early 2010s—a time when the IMF was still lurking in the background but utterly invisible on the lively Friday nights at Il Segreto, Merrion Row. People nursed their wounds from the crash while sipping vino, rubbing shoulders with the hardworking crowd striving to claw their way back from financial despair. Fast forward a few years, that same woman with a business degree swapped Mid-West grocery counters for the fast lanes of Silicon Valley, landing a gig at SpaceX. Now, thanks to those stock options everyone dreams about but few actually score, she’s sitting on a potential multi-million-euro goldmine — a jackpot that might make winning the lottery look like chump change. But here’s the kicker: should she cash in or hold tight? That’s the kind of dilemma that turns heads and sparks debate—not just about stocks but about the kind of risk, timing, and trust that define wealth creation in today’s wild market. Buckle up, because this isn’t just a story about one woman’s fortune—it’s a front-row seat to the madness and genius of Elon Musk’s space-age empire, and how it messes with our expectations of value and fortune. Ready to unpack this financial rollercoaster? LEARN MORE

A friend of mine in Dublin used to date a pretty American woman in the early 2010s, writes Nick Mulcahy.

The IMF was still in town, but you wouldn’t know it on Friday evenings at Il Segreto on Merrion Row, where my pal and ‘B’ used to dine.

For a brief period, the restaurant was jammed as the industrious Stokes twins Simon and Christian endeavoured to work their way out of financial trouble.

As finance minister Michael Noonan slashed spending and hiked taxes, most everyone in Il Segreto was licking their post-crash wounds while still knocking back the vino.

In time, some of the dining crowd recovered to modest prosperity, underpinned by grinding toil.

The American woman, who had a business degree, returned to the Mid-West, where for a while she had a cash register job with a food company.

Around 2018 my friend told B to cop on and she moved to California, where she landed a role with SpaceX.

Until recently SpaceX’s main activity was rocket launches, 165 last year, and B works in the scheduling department.

Like many of SpaceX’s 22,000 employees, B’s remuneration included share options.

At the company’s IPO price of $135, the former boyfriend in Dublin reckons that B’s shares were worth €3,280,000 after state and federal taxes.

B, now aged around 40, can’t dispose of those shares until 90 days after the IPO, so they will be worth more or less in mid-September.

Either way, this American woman will secure a capital windfall that those other Il Segreto customers could only ever land with a winning Lotto ticket.

Interestingly, B was in touch recently with her Irish lad seeking advice: should she sell or hold?

It’s the question everyone is asking after the SpaceX lift-off on Nasdaq.

SpaceX booked a loss of $5bn on revenue of $19bn last year and on fundamental share metrics the company’s IPO valuation was way over the odds.

However, some share prices are driven by vibes and nobody generates good vibes better than master huckster Elon Musk, the SpaceX founder.

It doesn’t matter that Musk’s mission statement for SpaceX — “to build the systems and technologies necessary to make life multi-planetary, to understand the true nature of the universe, and to extend the light of consciousness to the stars” — reads like it was generated by the company’s AI tool Grok.

It doesn’t matter that the SpaceX original core business — launching stuff into space — is unprofitable after trading for over two decades.

It doesn’t matter that the group’s newest venture — AI and X (Twitter) — booked a loss of $6.4bn last year on sales of $3.2bn.

Instead, people look at Musk’s EV manufacturer Tesla and note that its price/earnings ratio is x320 even though revenue has been static for the past three years and operating profit has been on a downward slide from $13bn to $4bn.

This Elon Musk factor defies rational analysis and prediction, so what’s our American girl to do?

My pal faced a dilemma in advising her. His instinct was to tell her to take her money off the table while the going is good.

But what if Musk and SpaceX mania persists to the end of the year and beyond and the share goes to $200? What would B think of my friend then?

If B sells in September and the share price keeps climbing, people will call her foolish for cashing out too soon. If she holds and shares tank, some will call her greedy for not taking the win when she had it.

SpaceX
Shares — SpaceX booked a loss of $5bn on revenue of $19bn last year and on fundamental share metrics the company’s IPO valuation was way over the odds. (Photo by Patrick T. Fallon / AFP via Getty Images)

B’s dilemma isn’t just about one person’s choice — it’s about what outsiders project onto it.

What we think says more about us than about the people we’re watching, which is worth bearing in mind the next time someone else’s numbers start climbing.