Everybody calm down about Elon Musk’s SpaceX IPO

It could be years before the company joins the S&P 500 stock index and becomes part of your portfolio.

Is DOGE coming for your 401(k) plan?

Ominous coverage of the forthcoming public offering of SpaceX, Elon Musk’s rocket company, makes it sound like the man who ransacked the federal bureaucracy in 2025 will soon wreak similar havoc with the stock market.

The Bulwark recently reported that anybody with a 401(k) plan will soon be “risking your retirement savings while simultaneously bailing out X and Cybertrucks.” The connection is that some index funds will buy SpaceX stock, and SpaceX now owns X, the social media network Elon Musk bought when it was called Twitter. SpaceX is also the largest buyer of the Cybertruck built by Tesla, another Musk company. So if you own SpaceX stock, you’re exposed to much of Musk’s sprawling business empire.

That might not have been a big worry a few years ago. But Musk has become a polarizing political figure who backed Donald Trump in the 2024 election and ran the “DOGE commission” that dismantled dozens of federal agencies, with no remit from Congress, once Trump became president in 2025. Musk’s approval rating fell after his DOGE detour, and now sits at around 36%.

For ordinary investors, there are three issues regarding the SpaceX IPO, which is the biggest ever. The first is whether you might get stuck owning the stock against your wishes, via an index fund. The second is whether you should buy the stock to cash in on a rocketship of a company, or ignore it. The third is whether the SpaceX IPO and a few other huge ones coming soon, including Anthropic and OpenAI, will change the investing climate.