IPOs are no longer Wall Street's starting line — they're the exit ramp: Chart of the Day

Wall Street used to get the growth story early. Now it often only gets the receipt.

SpaceX ( SPAX.PVT ) is targeting a public listing roughly 24 years after Elon Musk founded the rocket maker, underscoring a market shift that has pushed more company-building into private markets — and left public investors looking for wrappers, proxies, and ETFs to get in sooner.

A chart of some of the past four decades’ biggest IPOs shows that SpaceX is on the tail end of Wall Street norms.

SpaceX is arriving as a private-market giant, after years of growth funded outside the public stock market.

That is a very different path from some of today’s biggest public-market winners. Amazon ( AMZN ) listed roughly three years after its founding. Apple ( AAPL ) and Netflix ( NFLX ) took about five. Alphabet ( GOOG , GOOGL ) and Nvidia ( NVDA ) took about six.

The more recent crop waited longer. Tesla ( TSLA ) took about seven years to go public, Meta ( META ) took about eight, and Coinbase ( COIN ) and Uber ( UBER ) took closer to a decade. Spotify ( SPOT ) waited about 12 years before its direct listing.

Then there is the newer long-private cohort. Palantir ( PLTR ) waited about 17 years before its direct listing. Reddit ( RDDT ) took 19 years. SpaceX’s expected timeline would push even further, putting it closer to the far end of the chart than to the public-market origin stories that created earlier generations of tech wealth.

There are two important asterisks. Arm ( ARM ) most recently listed on the Nasdaq in 2023, after an earlier public-market run that ended with SoftBank taking the chipmaker private in 2016. Saudi Aramco ( 2223.SR ) also depends on the starting point. The chart uses the 1988 creation of the Saudi Arabian Oil Company and its 2019 Tadawul listing, even though the company’s roots go back further.