SpaceX’s IPO could open the floodgates — and secondaries are booming in the meantime Rebecca Bellan 11:41 AM PST · January 30, 2026 SpaceX is reportedly lining up four major Wall Street banks for a potential 2026 IPO — a move that could signal the long-awaited reopening of the public markets after a years-long IPO drought.
In the meantime, late-stage private companies like SpaceX are finding other ways to create liquidity for employees and early shareholders, largely through a fast-growing secondary market.
To unpack what SpaceX’s IPO chatter means, how private liquidity works before a debut, and what investors are looking for in today’s pre-IPO giants, we spoke with Greg Martin, managing director at Rainmaker Securities, a broker-dealer specializing in secondary share transactions for late-stage private companies.
You can listen here or wherever you get your podcasts, or read the conversation below.
UPDATE: This conversation took place before the news broke that SpaceX is considering merging with xAI and Tesla. TechCrunch reached out to Martin to learn how this news has affected SpaceX secondary sales. His response:
“ The news that SpaceX may be considering various transactions with xAI and Tesla, has caused a temporary pause in the market for SpaceX shares, as shareholders and investors sort through the implications of these potential transactions.
As both SpaceX and Tesla look to expand their business identities beyond their core businesses to reflect their future leadership in AI, the merger of any of these entities is increasingly intriguing. “
This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
I’m founder and managing director of Rainmaker Securities, which specializes in helping large late-stage, pre-IPO companies transact shares in the secondary market. I am also the founder of a secondary firm that buys private company shares called Archer Capital Group, and co-founder of Liquid Stock, a business that helps employees and executives exercise their options using their shares as collateral.
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These companies are significant in our economy, and investors really want access to these companies. At the same time, there are shareholders and executives and founders who have been in them for a long time and want to start seeing some liquidity from their shares, which are a very high percentage of their net worth.
So these two forces have created a thriving secondary market. And we only see this trend growing because more market cap is now housed in the private markets.
It’s an interesting question, because clearly when a SpaceX goes public, you could argue that $800 billion has just left the private system and is now in the public markets. But I think it just increases interest in more companies offering liquidity, and more investors coming into private markets. While SpaceX is a one-of-kind company, there are a lot of companies that are being started today and that are growing very fast. I mean, three or four years ago, what were OpenAI and Anthropic valued at? Those are now over a trillion dollars of combined market cap.
I really see the trend of the opportunity in the private secondary spaces as growing overall, and frankly, when we see the matriculation of SpaceX to the public markets, I think it’s going to actually increase the capital market interest in private companies.
If you think about the IPO market the last few years, it’s been pretty dismal since 2021, so the markets are really waiting for a bellwether company. And I think SpaceX is clearly a bellwether company…and there’s a huge amount of interest in that company.
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