If you’ve been at SpaceX for a while, the IPO probably feels less like a news story and more like a personal earthquake. For years your equity has been a number on a screen, real on paper, impossible to spend. June 12th starts changing that. And somewhere between the excitement and the lockup calendar, a quieter feeling shows up: okay, this is actually mine now. What am I supposed to do with it?

First, let me lower the temperature on one thing. You don’t have to figure this all out this week. The worst financial decisions I’ve watched people make weren’t from doing too little. They were from rushing, selling everything in a panic, or holding everything out of loyalty, both for emotional reasons dressed up as strategy. You have more time than the moment makes it feel like you do.

So let’s walk through what actually deserves your attention, calmly.

The real risk isn’t the IPO. It’s concentration.

Here’s the uncomfortable math. When most of your net worth is tied up in one stock, even a phenomenal one, your financial life and your employer’s stock chart are now the same chart. They rise together and they fall together.

Think of it like a climbing rope. One rope held you up beautifully on the way to the summit. But you’d never rappel down a cliff on a single strand with no backup, not because the rope is bad, but because the consequence of that one rope failing is everything. Diversification, in plain terms, is just clipping into a second rope. It’s not a bet against SpaceX. It’s a refusal to let any single thing be able to take you all the way down.

This is the single biggest issue for early employees, and almost nobody frames it honestly because the company stock has been so good to you. But “it’s been great so far” and “it deserves 80% of my net worth forever” are two very different statements.

The lockup is a calendar, and calendars can be planned around

SpaceX is reportedly using a tiered lockup. Shares becoming sellable in stages rather than all at once (reported windows around 70, 90, 105, 120, and 135 days post-IPO). A lockup, plainly, is the period you’re contractually barred from selling.

For you, the staggered structure is a gift, even if it doesn’t feel like one. It means you’re not forced to make one giant all-or-nothing decision on a single date. You can plan tranches — deciding in advance, while you’re calm, how much you’d sell at each window and why. The people who do well here write the plan before the window opens. The people who struggle improvise on the day, watching the ticker.

Taxes are where the real money is won or lost

This is the part that costs people the most, and it’s the least visible. A few concepts worth knowing the names of:

The type of equity you hold changes everything. ISOs, NSOs, RSUs, and early-exercised shares with an 83(b) election filed years ago are taxed in completely different ways — define that last one simply: an 83(b) election is a form some employees file early to be taxed at grant instead of vesting. If you filed one back when shares were nearly worthless, you may be sitting on a dramatically better tax outcome than a colleague who didn’t. You need to know which buckets your shares fall into before you sell a single one.

Then there’s QSBS — Qualified Small Business Stock. In plain English: certain stock held in a qualifying company for at least five years can exempt a meaningful chunk of the gain from federal tax. SpaceX’s history and your specific holding period determine whether any of yours qualifies. This one provision can be worth more than most people’s entire salary, and it turns entirely on details most folks don’t even know to check.

And the timing of when you sell shifts whether gains are taxed at short-term or long-term rates,  a difference that can be tens of percentage points.

I’m not going to pretend I can tell you your answer in a blog post. The point is the opposite: these are the questions that should be answered before the first sell window, not discovered in April with your accountant.

The honest trade-off

Selling down a concentrated position is smart because it protects the life you’ve already built — the gain that’s real today can’t be taken back by a bad year. The trade-off is real too: if SpaceX keeps climbing, you’ll watch shares you sold keep going up, and that stings. For most people in your seat the math still works, because the goal of this windfall isn’t to maximize the last dollar. It’s to make sure a single stock can never undo what it just gave you.

There’s no universally correct split. There’s only the split that lets you sleep, funds the life you actually want, and keeps you in the game if you’re right about the company long-term.

A quiet word on what comes next

A liquidity event like this is rarely just a tax question. It tends to surface the bigger ones. Do I keep working? What’s actually enough? What do I want this money to make possible — and what do I want to stop worrying about?

At my firm we start those conversations with your goals, not the market. The numbers matter enormously, but they come second. The first question is always what you’re building toward.

If you’re a SpaceX employee staring at a number you’ve never seen before and feeling a strange mix of thrilled and frozen — that’s normal, and you don’t have to sort it out alone or all at once. Whenever you’re ready to think it through, I’m happy to be a sounding board. No pitch, no pressure, and entirely at your pace.