Leif Abraham on Public.com's SpaceX IPO surge: half of all Friday buyers chose SpaceX, 533% more than NVIDIA

SpaceX IPO demand on Public.com

Leif Abraham, co-founder of Public.com, says the SpaceX IPO was the most popular the platform has ever seen, by a wide margin. On Friday, nearly half of all users who bought any stock chose SpaceX. The second most-traded stock was Nvidia, and SpaceX drew 533% more trading volume than Nvidia that day.

Where the retail allocation actually went

Despite headlines citing a retail allocation of roughly $100 billion, Abraham argues most of that never reached self-directed retail investors. The 20–30% retail tranche was dominated by wealth management clients at the major banks — JPMorgan, Merrill, and similar firms — whose advisers were also the IPO underwriters. That conflict of interest meant most ordinary retail investors received a single share, if anything.

Structurally, Abraham says, this is hard to fix. Once shares are common stock trading publicly, brokers cannot legally restrict retail investors from selling while allowing institutions to trade freely. The main enforcement mechanism is a flipping policy: get caught selling within a certain window, and you lose access to future IPOs.

“SpaceX was the most popular IPO that we have seen on the app ever by a wide margin... of everyone who bought a stock on Friday, nearly half of people who bought a stock on Friday bought SpaceX... SpaceX was 533% more trading than NVIDIA that day.”

The flipping risk is probably overstated

The fear that retail investors will dump IPO allocations quickly is, in Abraham's view, exaggerated. Public.com's historical net share retention on IPOs sits at roughly 125%, meaning users not only hold their allocations but add to their positions in the open market afterward. The platform skews toward buy-and-hold investors, not the Reddit and Telegram flipping communities that attract most of the attention.

Direct indexing for SpaceX skeptics

For investors uncomfortable with SpaceX entering major indices — whether for political reasons, valuation concerns, or objections to the index committee's exemption from its usual profitability criteria — Abraham points to Public.com's direct indexing product. Users can buy a customized S&P 500 that excludes specific names, with automatic rebalancing and tax-loss harvesting built in.

What this means for Anthropic and OpenAI

Abraham reads the SpaceX IPO as a green light for the next wave. The deal has been well-executed so far — the pop was meaningful but not excessive, and the stock held on day two. The multi-stage lockup schedule, timed against anticipated Nasdaq 100 inclusion, is designed to balance buy pressure against float expansion, and the early results suggest that orchestration is working. If he were advising Anthropic or OpenAI, he says, the message from this week is simple: the market is ready, and so are the bankers.