Robinhood Is Opening the SpaceX IPO to Everyday Investors. What That Means for the Stock.

SpaceX is expected to begin trading on the Nasdaq around June 12, with the initial public offering (IPO) price expected to be $135. In its filing, Elon Musk's rocket and satellite company named a short list of retail brokerages as channels for selling shares directly, and Robinhood Markets (NASDAQ: HOOD) is on it. Through the app's IPO Access feature, customers can submit a non-binding indication of interest -- essentially a request for a set number of shares -- ahead of the listing, with no minimum account balance required. SoFi is offering a similar path.

That detail matters more for Robinhood than it does for SpaceX. Getting retail into the largest IPO ever attempted, at the same price institutions pay, is the clearest example yet of a strategy the company has been building for years. And it could help bolster consumer interest in the broker's platform.

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Robinhood launched IPO Access back in 2021, when persuading companies to hand retail any allocation at all was a fight. That has flipped.

"[N]ow, retail has a real seat at the table in IPOs," said chief executive officer Vlad Tenev during the company's first-quarter earnings call, describing how founders now approach Robinhood directly and how retail allocations on recent deals have climbed toward 20% or 30% of an offering.

The SpaceX listing slots neatly into that shift. It also pairs with the company's other moves to crack open private markets, where much of the value in fast-growing companies has been created lately, before regular investors could touch it. In March, Robinhood took its closed-end fund, Robinhood Ventures Fund I , public, giving customers a way to own a slice of late-stage private companies; the fund added OpenAI to its portfolio shortly after.

The company has also been building Robinhood Chain, an effort to put real-world assets on a blockchain so they can trade more freely.

The common thread is engagement. Each new way to invest gives customers another reason to fund their accounts and stay active, and the early 2026 figures show why that matters. Robinhood ended the first quarter, the period that closed March 31, with 27.4 million funded customers, up 6% from a year earlier, and net deposits of about $18 billion. Total platform assets reached $307 billion, up 39%. A marquee offering like SpaceX -- the kind that draws in casual investors who might not otherwise open an account -- feeds directly into those metrics.