Do you own the giga-stocks, or don't you?

Not "do you have a job." Not "do you make a good salary." Not "did you go to college." Not "are you a hard worker." Those used to be the markers, and for most of the 20th century they were close enough to the truth. Show up, work hard, earn a paycheck, save a little, retire okay. The bargain wasn't generous, but it was reliable enough that most working people could plan around it.

That bargain has been quietly broken for forty-five years. The SpaceX IPO is the moment it stops being deniable, because the math at the top has gotten so big that no amount of headline-number reassurance can paper over it anymore.

Let me put two numbers next to each other.

A bedside nurse on a hospital ward in upstate New York, three years into her career, earning $68,000 a year. A working professional. Educated, credentialed, skilled, exhausted, doing one of the hardest and most important jobs in the country. By any historical measure of working life, she is doing the things you're supposed to do.

Elon Musk, on the day SpaceX lists, holding equity worth somewhere between $735 billion and $1 trillion. Adding his Tesla stake on top of that, he is on track to become the first human being worth a trillion dollars. The SpaceX prospectus has him on a path that goes higher than that. His performance tranches vest in increments all the way up to a $7.5 trillion company valuation.

The nurse and Musk are not on the same gradient. They are not even running the same race. He is wealthy because of what he owns. She is comfortable because of what she earns. Those are two different machines, and only one of them compounds.

The divide is real. The math is unsparing. Pretending otherwise has helped nobody. What earning means now. What owning means now. Who was already inside the building before the IPO was announced. What governance looks like when one man holds 85% of the votes in a $2 trillion company. What the numbers look like for the people you and I actually know.

The wealth gate has moved. It used to be income. It is now ownership of the assets that compound. Understand which side of that line you're on, and stop measuring yourself by the wrong yardstick.

This is going to take a while. There's a lot to unpack, and shortcuts won't help.

The most important sentence in this whole post: earning and owning are not on the same gradient, and they haven't been for a long time.

A salary, even a good one, is a paycheck. You exchange your time for money. The money pays for your life right now, this month, this year. If you save aggressively, a portion goes into accounts that may grow. The rate at which they grow is determined by markets you don't control, and the absolute amounts you can save are bounded by what's left after housing, healthcare, food, transport, taxes, childcare, and everything else has been paid for. For most working professionals in this country, what's left isn't much, no matter how much they earn on paper.

A stake in a $2 trillion company is a different category of thing entirely. It generates wealth on its own, while you sleep, while you do nothing, while you are also drawing a salary somewhere else. Compound growth on a sufficiently large equity position produces, in absolute dollars, more money in a year than most workers will see in a lifetime. That isn't an opinion. It's arithmetic.

Imagine a typical compounding rate on equity of about 8% per year, give or take. On Musk's expected post-IPO stake of about $1 trillion, that's roughly $80 billion of wealth generated in a single year, without him doing anything. Eighty billion. From sitting still.

Compare that to the bedside nurse from the opening of this post. At $68,000 a year, working forty-five years from age twenty-two to age sixty-seven, without ever taking a year off, with no raises beyond inflation, she will earn about $3 million across her entire working life. Three million dollars. Across her entire life.

Musk's passively compounding stake will produce that much new wealth in approximately twenty minutes.

This isn't a defect of the nurse's choices. She made all the right choices. Education, credential, profession, work ethic, the lot. The system she's operating in just doesn't reward those choices the way it rewards what Musk is doing, and the gap between the two reward systems has become so wide that no amount of hustle on the working side can possibly close it.

This is what people mean, or what they should mean, when they say "the rich get richer." They don't mean the rich have more money. They mean the rich own the machines that produce money on their own, and the rest of us don't.

One pattern I see constantly in this conversation: the use of national median wages to make the working middle class sound more comfortable than they actually are.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that the median wage for all US workers was about $49,500 in 2024. That number includes everybody. Lawyers, software engineers, hedge fund analysts, surgeons, professors. Half of all workers in this country earn under that figure. Many of them earn substantially under it.

Registered nurses have a national median of $93,600, which sounds great until you look at the distribution. The bottom 10% of RNs earn under $66,030. Nurses in their first year typically earn around $63,000. The headline number is being pulled upward by California specialty nurses, by metro hospital systems with strong unions, by nurse practitioners, by traveling nurses on premium contracts. The bedside RN you actually know, in a smaller city, three years in, is somewhere in the $55,000 to $75,000 range. The headline doesn't tell you that.

Licensed practical and vocational nurses, LPNs and LVNs, who do enormous amounts of the actual hands-on care in this country, have a national median of $62,340. Healthcare support occupations, which includes the home health aides, the personal care aides, the medical assistants, the people who do the bathing and the dressing and the carrying and the cleaning, have a median annual wage of $37,180. Thirty-seven thousand dollars.

Hold those numbers next to a $1 trillion Musk stake for a moment. The $37,180 healthcare aide doing some of the most physically and emotionally demanding work in the country earns, in a year, what Musk's stake generates in passive compound growth in roughly fourteen seconds.

I am being deliberately granular about this because the conversation always loses something when it stays at the level of averages. The actual people we know, the ones doing the work that keeps daily life functioning, are not earning $93,600 nurse-medians. They are earning $50,000s and $60,000s. The bottom of the healthcare workforce is earning $37,000. School support staff are earning less than that. Retail workers, food service workers, warehouse workers, the entire frontline of the consumer economy, are earning less than that. The Starbucks median we saw in the previous post was $14,674.

These are not unskilled people. These are not lazy people. These are people doing essential work for compensation that has, in real terms, gone almost nowhere for forty-five years, while the equity owners at the top of the same companies they work for have seen their wealth multiply.

That isn't an accident, and it isn't a failure of the workers. It is exactly what a system optimized for ownership instead of work was designed to produce.

When SpaceX lists on June 12, the people getting rich are not the retail investors buying their first shares on day one. The people getting rich are the people who already owned the company at fractions of its IPO price, sometimes at less than one percent of it.

Look at the cap table.

Alphabet, Google's parent company, led a $900 million round into SpaceX in 2015. At an early-stage valuation. Eleven years later, that stake is worth, conservatively, something north of $120 billion. Eleven years of pure equity compounding, for an institution that already had more cash than it knew what to do with.

Fidelity is in. Founders Fund is in. Sequoia Capital is in. Andreessen Horowitz is in. T. Rowe Price is in. Baillie Gifford is in. Valor Equity Partners, whose CEO sits on the SpaceX board, holds 7.3% of the Class A shares pre-IPO. Various sovereign wealth funds are in. After the xAI merger in February 2026, Nvidia and the Qatar Investment Authority got positions too. BlackRock is reportedly in talks to anchor up to $10 billion of the IPO itself, meaning it will be sitting on the deal before the retail market opens.

Every one of these holders bought in at a valuation a small fraction of where SpaceX will list. By the time SPCX hits the Nasdaq at $1.75 trillion, every one of those positions has multiplied many times over. The compounding has happened, in the private market, where ordinary investors couldn't access it.

This is what private market capitalism looks like in 2026, and it is the most important wealth-flow story of our era. The big money is no longer made in the public markets where everyone can participate. It is made in the private markets, in the years before a company lists, when valuations are growing geometrically and only accredited investors and institutional capital can buy in. By the time a company hits the public market, the easy years of growth have largely been captured by the people who were already inside. Retail investors get to buy the stock at whatever price reflects all that prior growth, and from there their returns are bounded by what the company does next.

This is technically legal. It is also a structural mechanism for ensuring that the wealthiest investors capture the largest share of value creation, and that ordinary investors get to participate only at the back end of the curve, where returns are normalized.

There are real arguments for why private market regulation matters, why the SEC has rules about who can invest where, why "accredited investor" status is gatekept by net worth. Some of those arguments are about consumer protection. Many of them are not. The cumulative effect, whatever the intent, is a wealth-creation pipeline that funnels the largest returns to people who were already rich enough to access it.

There is a counter-fact in the deal that cuts the other way. It's the one detail that gets cited every time someone argues that the wealth divide isn't really what it looks like, and it deserves to be taken seriously.

SpaceX has reportedly reserved up to 30% of the IPO shares for retail investors. Across seven countries. The United States, the United Kingdom, the European Union, Australia, Canada, Japan, and South Korea. This was first reported by Reuters in late March 2026, and subsequently confirmed by The Motley Fool, CNBC, Yahoo Finance, Euronews, Benzinga, and The Bull. SpaceX's chief financial officer Bret Johnsen reportedly framed the decision to the company's 21-bank syndicate as a deliberate departure from standard practice, recognising long-time supporters of SpaceX and Musk personally. Distribution will run through platforms ordinary people actually use, including Robinhood and SoFi, alongside the retail arms of Bank of America, Morgan Stanley's E*Trade, UBS, and Citi.

That number, 30%, is roughly three times the typical retail allocation in a major US listing. Fidelity, which has tracked IPO allocations for decades, puts the historical institutional-to-retail split across all IPOs at 90/10. SpaceX is reportedly going 70/30. It is the largest deliberate opening of a mega-IPO to ordinary investors in the modern era.

So on the face of it, here's a working person's chance to get in on the trillion-dollar machine. The argument I've been making, that the wealth creation happened in private markets and retail gets left holding the bag, looks like it has just been weakened by the most important deal in the world.

Look closer, because that isn't actually what's happening.

Access is not the same as wealth creation. Retail investors buying SpaceX on June 12 are not getting in early. They are getting in at $1.75 trillion. The compounding from $50 billion to $1.75 trillion already happened, in the private market, between roughly 2015 and 2026. Alphabet captured it. Fidelity captured it. Sequoia, Founders Fund, Andreessen Horowitz, T. Rowe Price, Baillie Gifford, the sovereign wealth funds, Valor Equity Partners, all captured it. By the time you can click "buy" on the morning of the listing, more than 30x of equity growth has already been captured by the people who were inside the building before the doors opened.

A working lawyer and CPA named Chad Cummings put this more bluntly than I could, quoted in a Yahoo Finance piece this month. He said retail investors clicking "buy" on the morning SpaceX opens "are not 'early' — they are the exit strategy for the venture capital and private equity shares, not to mention shares held by Musk himself and other employees." That's not a fringe take. That's how the institutional world describes what's happening, when the cameras are off.

The valuation tells you who the deal is designed for. At $1.75 trillion, SpaceX is listing at roughly 93 times trailing sales, according to analysis in Investing.com. For comparison, the S&P 500 trades at about 3 times sales. Nvidia, the AI poster child everyone has heard of, trades at around 22 times sales. CNBC reported analysts as comparing the multiple unfavorably to a plate of dauphinoise potatoes, which I include for color and because the underlying point is correct. A deal priced at this multiple is not designed to deliver compound returns to the next generation of holders. It is designed to provide liquidity to the previous generation of holders.

Day-one pops do not equal generational wealth. If the stock pops 20 or 30 percent on its first day of trading, retail buyers who got their allocation will book a tidy short-term gain. That isn't nothing, and I won't pretend it is. But a $5,000 retail allocation that gains 30% in a week is $1,500. The Alphabet position that has gone from roughly $900 million in 2015 to a reported $120 billion at the IPO valuation has gained roughly $119 billion. Those two numbers are not on the same gradient. The retail story is a tip. The pre-IPO story is the meal.

Watch where the money flows after listing. Benzinga reported that ETF inclusion rules will trigger an estimated $27 billion of forced buying when SPCX gets added to major indices in the months after listing. That is the actual liquidity event. Index funds, pension funds, and ETFs are required by their mandates to buy any newly listed stock that hits inclusion thresholds, and they buy at whatever the market price happens to be. Retail's 30% is real, but it sits next to a wall of mandatory institutional buying that dwarfs it. The structural beneficiaries of the listing are the people who own the company before the doors open, and the institutional vehicles that have to buy it after. Retail sits between those two flows, contributing some price discovery and absorbing some of the float, while the real money moves around them.

The line here is specific. The 30% retail allocation is, in absolute terms, a good thing. It is more access than retail investors have ever had in a mega-IPO. Some people who participate will make money on it. If you have allocation through your broker and you want to take a small position knowingly, with money you can afford to have go to zero, do it eyes-open and good luck.

What it doesn't change is the deeper picture this whole series has been pointing at. The wealth machine of the modern American economy operates in private markets, on multi-year timescales, with access gated by accredited-investor rules, network membership, and institutional capital. When a company finally hits the public market, the largest gains have already been booked. Retail is invited at the end, not the beginning.

The 30% allocation isn't a contradiction of the divide. It's an illustration of it.

The SpaceX governance structure matters here, because it is the new norm and the regular norm is not coming back.

Elon Musk, per the S-1, holds around 50% of SpaceX equity outright. He controls 85.1% of the voting power, through a dual-class share structure in which the Class B shares he holds get ten votes each, versus one vote for the Class A shares that public investors will buy. The filing puts it explicitly. "Mr. Musk will have the power to control the outcome of matters requiring shareholder approval, including election of all our directors."

Translation: even after going public, SpaceX is run as a sole proprietorship at the governance layer. Public investors are buying economic exposure to the company without any meaningful say in how it is run.

On top of his existing stake, Musk was granted, in January 2026, an additional performance package of 1 billion Class B shares. Those vest in fifteen tranches of 66,666,665 shares each, with each tranche unlocking when SpaceX hits the next $500 billion valuation milestone, all the way up to $7.5 trillion. They also require, as a vesting condition, that SpaceX "establish a permanent human colony on Mars with at least one million inhabitants."

Read those conditions back to yourself. $7.5 trillion. Mars colony. One million people. These are the numbers and conditions actually written into the public filing of a company about to be valued at $1.75 trillion on day one. This isn't speculative journalism. This is what the company is asking investors to accept as the structural rewards of its founder.

The Class B dual-class structure isn't unique to SpaceX. Meta has one. Alphabet has one. Many recent tech IPOs do. The structure exists because founders want to retain control after listing, and the markets have, by and large, accepted the deal. Public investors get to be along for the ride. They don't get to vote on the course.

This is, on its own, a structural concentration of wealth and power. One man, half the equity, 85% of the votes, on track to be worth a trillion dollars at minimum, with stock packages stacked behind that going into the multi-trillions. Whatever one thinks about Musk specifically, the architecture of his shareholding is the new model for how the largest companies in the world will be controlled.

One thing the political conversation in this country has been incapable of catching up to.

"Working class" has historically meant something specific. Manual labor. Hourly wages. Without a college degree. In factories or trades or transport or service. The shape of working-class life was strongly identified with a particular kind of job and a particular educational profile.

That definition is forty years out of date. The reality of working-class life in 2026, in the United States, includes the nurse making $68,000. It includes the schoolteacher making $58,000. It includes the small business owner doing $200,000 in annual revenue but taking home half of that and absorbing all the risk. It includes the IT support tech making $74,000. It includes the police officer, the firefighter, the social worker, the early-career attorney making $85,000 with $200,000 in student loans. It includes the graphic designer freelancing from home and never quite making it past month-to-month. It includes you, possibly, if you're reading this and feeling some of it land.

The dividing line is no longer manual versus white-collar. It is owner versus worker. If your wealth is overwhelmingly composed of what you earn, and what you can save, and modest equity through a 401(k), you are on the working side of the line. It doesn't matter what your job is called, what degree you have, what title sits on your business card. The new working class includes a vast swath of educated, professional, salaried people who used to think of themselves as middle class or even upper-middle class, and who increasingly cannot make the basic arithmetic of life add up the way their parents could.

About 62% of Americans report owning some stock, mostly through retirement accounts. That sounds reassuring until you look at the distribution. The top 10% of US households own roughly 93% of all stock market wealth. The bottom 50% owns about 1% of it. So while "I have a 401(k)" feels like ownership, the scale of that ownership for the median household is so small relative to the top that it functions more like a participation token than a meaningful stake.

This is what working class looks like now. The label has shifted. The conversation hasn't caught up.

There are two honest things to say at this point, and they don't contradict each other.

The first is that this is not a problem you can fix at the kitchen table. The forces pushing the divide wider are macro. Tax policy. Share structures. Central bank decisions. Who gets to participate in private markets before companies list. What gets counted as income versus capital gains. How the SEC writes accredited investor rules. Whether Section 162(m) limits on deductible executive compensation actually constrain anything in practice. Pretending any of this can be solved with a personal finance hack is the kind of advice that mostly serves the person giving it, not the person hearing it. I am not going to do that.

The second thing is that knowing which game is being played is still better than not knowing. You can spend the next ten years working hard, saving prudently, earning a respectable income, doing everything you are supposed to do, and never close the gap, because you were running the salary race while the wealth race was happening somewhere else entirely. Understanding that isn't despair. It's clarity. It tells you what to push back on politically. It tells you what to advocate for. It tells you what to actually expect from the systems that govern your money, your retirement, your kids' futures.

It also stops you from blaming yourself for the gap that has been engineered into the system. There is a particular brand of personal responsibility discourse that takes the structural problems we've been describing and turns them back on the individual. "If only you had budgeted better." "If only you had bought Tesla in 2014." "If only you had taken more risk." That framing serves exactly one purpose, which is to keep the conversation focused on individual failings instead of on the architecture of who gets to own what, when, and how.

This is also why so much of the public conversation about the economy feels weirdly disconnected from how most people actually live. People are told the economy is strong because GDP is up. They are told wages are growing because some average number ticked higher. They are not told that the assets which produce real wealth are now concentrated more tightly than at any point on the record. They are not told that the largest single units of value creation are now privately held companies controlled by individual founders. They live the divide and get told it doesn't exist. After a while, that gap between what's said and what's true becomes its own kind of damage. It produces a politics of resentment that doesn't quite know what it's resentful of, because the actual mechanism has been kept out of the headlines.

The job of writing about this honestly is to name the mechanism. So.

The mechanism is asset ownership. The asset class is equity in the largest companies in the world. The gatekeeping is private markets, dual-class share structures, accredited investor rules, capital gains tax treatment, and the buyback machine that funnels corporate profits to the people who already own the equity. The result is a tiny fraction of the population accumulating wealth at a rate the rest of the population cannot mathematically catch.

That is the divide. Everything else is decoration.

A few things you can actually do here, even knowing the limits.

Own equity where you can. Through index funds. Through retirement accounts. Through whatever pre-tax vehicles your employer offers. It does not close the gap. It does keep you from being entirely on the wrong side of compound growth in public markets, which is meaningfully better than nothing. If your employer offers a 401(k) match and you aren't capturing the full match, fix that this week. That is the easiest free money most working professionals will ever encounter.

Read every headline number with one eye closed. When somebody quotes you GDP, ask about distribution. When somebody quotes you average wages, ask about median. When somebody quotes you a stock market high, ask who owns the stock. The questions don't change the answers. They stop you from being misled by the framing.

Be honest about your political agency, which is real but bounded. You cannot rewrite tax policy by yourself. You can vote for people who would. You can write to your elected officials with specifics. You can support organizations that do the actual policy work, like the Economic Policy Institute or the Institute for Policy Studies. You can be the person in the conversation who knows the actual numbers when somebody starts repeating the headline. None of these alone changes anything. All of them together is what social change has always looked like.

Stop measuring yourself by the wrong yardstick. If you are working hard and feel like you're falling behind despite doing everything right, you are not crazy and you are not failing. You are operating inside a system that has been carefully arranged, for forty-five years, to ensure that working hard and earning a good salary is no longer enough. Recognizing that is not defeatism. It's the precondition for any honest conversation about what to do next.

And know what the divide actually is, in this country, in 2026. It is not rich versus poor in the old sense. It is shareholders of the giga-companies versus everyone else. The bedside nurse and the freelance designer and the small business owner and the schoolteacher and the IT tech are all on the same side of that line, even though they used to think of themselves as different classes. We are now all the working class. The earlier we recognize that, and the earlier we stop letting outdated labels divide us, the sooner the conversation that might actually change something can begin.

That's the macro picture, in as much detail as I can fit into a piece you'll actually read. Whatever else AI does, whatever else the next decade brings, the divide is the through-line. Notice it. Name it accurately. Don't let anybody convince you the headline number is the whole story.

In the coming weeks, the practical other half. Five shorter pieces on the tool that's accelerating all of this, and how to work with it without getting burned. The world is what it is. There is still work to do inside it, and there is still a way to do that work well.

If either of these last two pieces have landed, or if any of it has made you angry, reply and tell me. I read every one.

Best

Jono