Astronaut costumes, teenage crypto millionaires, and a $300 million bet: Scenes from the SpaceX IPO

From a prop trader who bet “a car” to an early investor sitting on $300 million, the sidewalk outside the Nasdaq represented everyone in the AI market.

The crowd outside the Nasdaq on Friday morning skewed young, male, and anxious.

George Manchin, a 22-year-old prop trader from Hong Kong, had put in for “a little bit” of SpaceX stock—“like a car, but it’s gonna be more than a car now.” Behind him, Hemanth Golla, an early investor through his venture fund High Circle Capital, is sitting on $300 million worth.

“It’s very exciting,” Golla told Fortune at the scene outside Nasdaq in Manhattan. “Not just monetarily, but also it’s a historic moment. I’ve been a big fan of Elon, so it’s been an amazing journey so far.”

There were more than two people in astronaut outfits, bouncing around between different press interviews; there were teenage “retired crypto traders” with hired cameramen talking about the IPO. The SpaceX IPO, the biggest in history, is a rare market event that doubles as a tourist attraction. The sidewalk outside the Nasdaq on Friday seemed to contain a microcosm of the entire psychology of this market: early money waiting for its exit window; retail money rushing in; and a broad, cheerful consensus that the company is overvalued—but it doesn’t really matter. 

“Everyone knows it’s overvalued, but do they care?” said Jasper Howard, a 19-year-old who calls himself the “Clavicular of Crypto,” referring to the notorious looksmaxxing streamer. He said he was “retired” from crypto, but still streaming.

“We know in 10 years, space exploration is gonna be this huge thing,” Howard said. “AI is gonna be this huge thing. So it doesn’t really matter right now if it’s overvalued, because in the future it will be fairly valued.”

Howard said he’d sit this one out—crypto IPOs burned him—but his friends had thrown in six figures apiece, on day one. One friend had thrown in a million, he said. 

Eva Roytburg for Fortune

The biggest IPO in history

SpaceX 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 everyone who’s going to buy already has. Currently, it’s trading at just over $170 a share.

What the buyers think they’re buying, increasingly, is not rockets. Asked what pushes a valued-at-$1.77-trillion company higher, Golla didn’t mention Mars. He pointed to the compute capacity deals with Anthropic and Google—worth “$20, $30 billion in the last couple of months,” by his account—and predicted SpaceX builds another three or four data centers within a year. “That’s going to increase the revenue by another five times or 10 times,” he said. 

Manchin, the prop trader, made the same case: “Nobody but xAI has computing power, and if you’re gonna find computing power right now, I’ll buy it.”

Not everyone was buying it. Some in the vicinity of the crowd told Fortune they didn’t understand the timing of the IPO, and described exit liquidity—when the function of new buyers is to let earlier investors sell. Golla could recite his lockup calendar from memory: Lockup restrictions start loosening 45 to 60 days out; roughly 20% at the first earnings report; staged tranches after that; everything unrestricted by day 180. Still, he’s holding.

“We are looking at very long, I mean, like, a three- to four-year period,” Golla said. “So I think it’s all going to play out well.”

By late morning the crowd had thinned. Zeke Spector, who had bought an astronaut costume in Midtown and paid FedEx $170 to print and bind the full S-1, was already planning his outfit for the Anthropic listing. “Do I dress up like a data center? Like a refrigerator?” The bit, like the market, must keep going.

“This is history,” he said, “whether you like it or not.”

Eva Roytburg for Fortune

A few blocks away, outside JPMorgan Chase’s new headquarters on Park Avenue, about two dozen protesters held a small demonstration complete with a 30-foot banner decrying Musk’s new trillionaire status.

“We’re outside the JPMorgan corporate headquarters, where they’re about to host a lavish party for Elon Musk,” a protester announced as others chanted, “Shame, shame, shame.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com