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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The access story is the real catalyst

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.

But trading activity is still key

For all the momentum in deposits and new products, Robinhood's profits still ride heavily on how much its customers trade, and that's where the recent results showed some cracks. First-quarter revenue grew 15% year over year to $1.07 billion, but a closer look shows the growth came in spite of the company's crypto business, not because of it. Cryptocurrency revenue sank 47% to $134 million as digital-asset trading cooled from its late-2025 frenzy.

What kept the quarter growing was the spread of newer products. Revenue from event contracts -- the prediction-market bets Robinhood now offers on outcomes like elections and sports -- jumped to $104 million from just $3 million a year earlier. Net interest revenue, much of it from lending against customer balances, rose 24% to $359 million. So the diversification is working, but it didn't fully offset the crypto drop: first-quarter earnings per share rose just 3% to $0.38.

The stock has felt that cooling. After soaring more than 200% in 2025, shares are down roughly 22% so far in 2026 and sit far below their October high near $152. Even after that slide, the stock trades at about 43 times earnings as of this writing -- a valuation premium that leaves little cushion if trading activity remains soft.

But the hype around SpaceX -- and Robinhood's involvement in its IPO -- could help. Drawing retail into a headline IPO is a genuine win for Robinhood's funnel, and broadening access to private companies could become a durable driver of engagement over time. With that said, IPO allocations can be partial or unfilled when demand runs hot.

Ultimately, the access expansion may strengthen the businesses long-tem potential, but it might not be a big enough catalyst to really reinvigorate activity on its platform and help lift the stock from its slump. So while this is some interesting news, I don't think it's material enough to make Robinhood stock a buy here. It has a high valuation that arguably already prices in strong growth and an eventual resurgence in trading activity.

Daniel Sparks and his clients have no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.