Noory, a 41-year-old fintech entrepreneur, spent years listening to Musk’s video and podcast interviews. Tesla stock makes up some 85% of his net worth, and when shares of SpaceX start trading, he plans to buy. “What’s there to think about?” Noory said.

He doesn’t consider himself a Musk fanboy, just a believer in the tech founder’s vision of a multiplanetary future powered by superhuman artificial intelligence. “You have a limitless industry with Elon Musk at the helm,” Noory said.

On Friday, the SpaceX stock ticker is expected to make its debut in the biggest initial public offering of all time: Musk plans to raise close to $75 billion in a deal that could make him the world’s first trillionaire.

The stock offering also will be a landmark moment for everyday investors in Wall Street’s retail revolution.

Over the past few years, individual investors have coalesced into a market-moving force, upending hedge-fund bets, salvaging struggling companies and sending favored stocks straight to the moon. Total volume for both retail stock and options trades reached new records in May, according to Citadel Securities.

Their power is expanding, and Musk knows as well as anyone how to tap it. At Tesla, individual investors make up about a third of the shareholder base. Their faith and enthusiasm helped the company’s valuation reach a level that surpasses the next 30 largest automakers’ combined—despite ranking 12th in U.S. sales.

Musk has promised to return the favor. “I’m a huge fan of small retail investors,” he wrote in a 2020 tweet about a potential public offering of SpaceX or its Starlink business. “Will make sure they get top priority. You can hold me to it.”

Musk is expected to set aside an unusually large portion of SpaceX shares sold in the offering for individual investors—likely around 20% or more compared with 5% to 7% of shares typically allocated in an IPO. Even that sizable chunk will likely fall short of demand. The company, valued at about $1.77 trillion at its $135 targeted IPO price, has been effectively inaccessible to most retail investors. Brokerages that cater to those traders anticipate an overwhelming number of takers.

Financial firms are responding with similar enthusiasm. A Merrill Lynch office in Houston held an information meeting about the SpaceX IPO for clients last week, people familiar with the matter said. Guests received baseball hats adorned with the SpaceX logo.

Individual traders are expected to play a crucial, though risky, role in powering a double-digit jump on listing day. Some stocks have debuted to great fanfare, then tumbled in the weeks after going public. About a quarter of IPO stocks lose at least half of their value in the three years after listing day, according to historical data collected by University of Florida professor emeritus Jay Ritter.

Through more than two decades as a private company, SpaceX has raised billions of dollars from shareholders that include many of the world’s largest money managers, from mutual funds to big endowments. The skeptics, including some retail traders, say the easy money has already been made and that the pros are looking for someone else to get stuck holding the bag.

SpaceX’s valuation grew more than 2,000% in the past few years. Individual investors missed out on nearly all those gains—and they would have the most to lose if share prices fall.

“I think most retail investors should avoid trading this like the plague,” said Dave Nadig, a veteran fund analyst who expects extreme volatility in SpaceX share prices in the weeks after it goes public. “This is one of the biggest get-the-popcorn moments I’ve had.”

SpaceX didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Seat belt sign is on

The last time Tamar June tried to get in early on an IPO was Yahoo, in 1996. June, now 63, said her home office at the time had a dial-up modem, trading software downloaded from a compact disc and a dodgy internet connection.

“So painful,” said June, a tech executive based in Reno, Nev. On the day Yahoo went public, she placed an order for 100 shares when the market opened and sold them an hour later for a 30% profit—minus a hefty commission fee.

In 2013, Robinhood Markets launched an app for commission-free trading, making it cheap and easy for rookie investors to trade stocks. For the first time, it was possible to dabble in all kinds of investments—from memecoins to complex options—on a smartphone.

During the pandemic, Robinhood and other digital investment tools helped birth a new generation of day traders, drawing from people stuck at home, some flush with cash from government stimulus payments. Together, these investors sparked the meme-stock frenzy that sent shares of videogame retailer GameStop skyrocketing—and that caught Musk’s attention.

June, whose portfolio leans heavily toward tech giants such as Apple, Oracle and Intel, is one of those vying for SpaceX shares. She said she has kept track of SpaceX for years and at home uses Starlink, the company’s satellite internet service. There also is the allure of Musk himself.

“I get it—the guy is a bit strange,” June said. “But think of the ideas he has executed.”

In the past five years, the retail crowd has burrowed into nearly every corner of Wall Street—piling into the artificial-intelligence trade, placing wagers on prediction markets and live-tweeting company earnings calls. IPOs, once an exclusive domain, are no exception.

Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev said the brokerage in years past had to plead with issuers to set aside stock for the company’s IPO Access program, which distributes allocated retail shares at random to interested customers. Companies now ask Robinhood how much they should set aside for retail investors, Tenev told analysts on a call this spring.

“We really had to claw and scratch and ask for favors,” Tenev said. Now, he added, “pretty much every major IPO of consequence has been on Robinhood’s platform.”

Like other brokerages, Robinhood offers investors the chance to request shares of specific IPOs at the listing price before the company goes public. There are no guarantees that customers get all the shares they want or any at all. Brokerages offering access to IPOs say it isn’t unusual for requests to reach 10, 20 or 50 times the number of available shares. Most expect demand for SpaceX to be even greater.

“It’s just the perfect storm for exorbitant retail enthusiasm and demand,” said Mike Treacy, head market analyst and vice president of risk at Apex Fintech Solutions. “Strap on your seat belts.”

After the SpaceX prospectus was made public on May 20, visitors to a Charles Schwab webpage of upcoming IPOs tripled, the brokerage said.

“Most of the interest is emotional, which is the honest truth,” said Jeff Judge, a financial planner in Forest Hill, Md. “People want to own a piece of Elon Musk’s rocket company.”

Faith-based

Musk tapped his fan base to win a 2024 dispute over his $46 billion compensation package at Tesla. He campaigned on X to get the pay plan approved, and the company raffled off a chance for a tour of a Tesla production plant with the CEO.

“Musk is a superstar, whether you like him or not,” said Randal Brown, a 70-year-old retired physician and business owner hoping to buy SpaceX shares. “Everything he touches, it works.”

That is the kind of faith Musk needs for an enterprise with a financial picture notably worse than any other megacap U.S. company. SpaceX was unprofitable last year, filings show, and losses widened in the first quarter of 2026. The company made $18.7 billion in revenue in 2025, meaning the company is priced at about 93.6 times its sales. By comparison, the price-to-sales ratio of the S&P 500 is roughly 3.3, according to FactSet.

Individual investors, unlike the pros, are less likely to scrutinize a price-to-earnings ratio, much less a sophisticated cash-flow analysis before clicking “buy,” according to Wall Street veterans. Musk’s fans are stirred more by the entrepreneur’s long-term vision of rockets, robots, AI chatbots and data centers in space.

Small-time investors without a six-figure portfolio are welcome: Robinhood doesn’t have a minimum balance requirement to request shares of SpaceX. Fidelity generally requires a minimum of $100,000 or $500,000 in brokerage accounts for investors to engage in IPOs, depending on the offering. For SpaceX, the threshold at Fidelity was set at $2,000.

Critics on Wall Street say the risks of holding SpaceX shares extend to millions of rank-and-file savers. Months ahead of the offering, bankers reached out to major index providers to discuss how SpaceX might join key indexes sooner than usual. That means SpaceX shares would show up almost immediately in some of the index funds that anchor stock portfolios nationwide.

The Nasdaq, the exchange where SpaceX chose to list, agreed to fast-track entry into its Nasdaq-100. Shares of SpaceX would be eligible to join the index after just 15 trading days, instead of waiting as long as a year. The S&P 500 on Thursday denied Musk a speedy entry, saying it would uphold its time frames and rules requiring that entrants first be profitable. SpaceX lost $4.9 billion last year.

SpaceX has instituted staggered lockup releases for its stock—meaning there will be more shares available sooner than usual for newly public companies—and that could drive the stock price lower. A top-heavy market could amplify swings in tech shares. A frenetic rally in semiconductor stocks abruptly reversed last week, sending the Nasdaq composite down 4.2%, in its worst day in more than a year.

Banks are telling prospective investors that SpaceX revenue could reach $3.4 trillion in 2040, according to a Morgan Stanley analysis, The Wall Street Journal reported.

On the day of the SpaceX IPO, Josh Hill, a 37-year-old North Carolina-based sales manager at a manufacturing company, plans to pour a cup of coffee, close the door to his home office, open Robinhood and wait for SpaceX shares to start trading.

Hill expects Musk to dominate the space industry. “Long-term,” he said, “it’s a no-brainer.”

But will he hit buy on Friday?

“The price would have to fall,” Hill said—otherwise, “I’m probably not a buyer.”

Write to Hannah Erin Lang at hannaherin.lang@wsj.com and Corrie Driebusch at corrie.driebusch@wsj.com