A Story Worth Slowing Down For
When SpaceX went public in 2026, most of the coverage focused on the size of the offering and the valuation it implied — raising $75 billion and pushing the company’s valuation beyond $2 trillion after trading began. But one story from that week deserves more attention than it received — not because it is a typical outcome, but because it illustrates something fundamental about how wealth is built. (CNBC)
Juan Hernandez was a welder. Before joining SpaceX, he had never heard of the company. “It was just another contract job for me at the time,” he said. When SpaceX brought him on full time in 2015, they offered him $10,000 in stock. He did not think much of it. None of his previous jobs had offered equity. He bought more with each paycheck for ten years. (Yahoo Finance)
When SpaceX finally went public, Hernandez owned roughly 6,500 shares. At the company’s opening market valuation, those shares were worth more than $1 million. He is now teaching his three children — including his 16-year-old daughter, who already holds positions in Meta and a handful of other companies — what he learned from that decade of ownership. (Gulf News, CBS News)
“The employees who benefited most weren’t the ones who bought on opening day. They were the ones who had access years before that day arrived.”
Hernandez was not a venture capitalist. He was not wealthy. He was a skilled tradesperson who, through his employer, happened to gain access to equity in a private company — and held it patiently for a decade. That access, and that patience, is the lesson.
SpaceX’s debut is expected to produce one of the largest employee wealth-generation events in corporate history, with thousands of current and former workers set to benefit. What made that possible was not the IPO. It was the decade of private ownership that preceded it. (Storyboard18, Euronews)
A note on what this story is — and is not
Juan Hernandez’s outcome is an outlier. It is presented here not as a model result or a reasonable expectation, but as an illustration of a structural principle: that meaningful wealth creation in private companies tends to happen before those companies are accessible to public market investors. SpaceX is one of the most successful private companies in history. Most early-stage ventures do not reach an IPO, let alone one at this scale. The lesson is not “invest in SpaceX” or any particular company. The lesson is that access to the asset class — managed carefully, diversified deliberately, and evaluated by fiduciaries who know what they are looking at — is the thing worth understanding.
What Private Markets Actually Are
Most investors spend their entire financial lives in public markets — buying and selling stocks listed on the NYSE or Nasdaq. That is understandable. Public markets are accessible, liquid, and familiar.
But the companies available on public exchanges represent only a fraction of the opportunity set. The number of publicly listed U.S. companies has declined significantly since the late 1990s. Today, there are approximately 4,700 publicly traded companies compared to 33 million companies in the private sector. A growing share of economic activity and wealth creation happens in the private sector, out of reach of most traditional portfolios.
Private markets encompass several distinct asset classes:
- Private Equity Funds that acquire ownership stakes in private companies, typically working to improve operations and grow value over a multi-year horizon before selling or listing.
- Venture Capital Early-stage capital deployed to startups and high-growth companies before they reach public markets. This is where the highest-risk, highest-potential-return opportunities typically reside.
- Private Credit Direct lending to private companies, often generating yields meaningfully higher than publicly traded bonds in exchange for reduced liquidity.
- Infrastructure Investments in physical assets such as toll roads, energy pipelines, data centers, and utilities. These tend to generate stable, contractual cash flows with low correlation to public market volatility.
- Commercial Real Estate Investments in multi-family housing, industrial warehouses, retail, office, and hospitality assets, as well as specialist properties including senior housing, medical office buildings, and data center facilities. Private commercial real estate investments can produce total returns comparable to public equity, along with stable, tax-deferred cash flows and a degree of protection against unanticipated inflation.
Why Early Access Changes the Math in Venture Capital
When Juan Hernandez received SpaceX equity in 2015, there was no ticker symbol, no way for a retail investor to participate, no public price discovery. The only people who could access SpaceX ownership were employees, venture capital firms, and large institutional investors.
This dynamic is not unique to SpaceX. It is the structural reality of how most successful companies grow. By the time a business reaches a public offering, it has often already captured the steepest part of its growth curve. The IPO, in many cases, is when early investors and employees realize gains — not when new investors begin building them.
For SpaceX’s early stakeholders, the public listing did not mark the beginning of an investment strategy. It was the conclusion of one — a strategy that had demanded years of patience, illiquidity, and conviction in a business plan that had once seemed impractical. (TheStreet)
It is worth naming the full picture here. SpaceX’s outcome is a spectacular outlier, not a representative result. Within venture capital, for every company that reaches a transformative public offering, many more fail to reach commercialization. That is not an argument against venture capital. It is an argument for how it must be approached.
Well-constructed venture capital managers build diversified portfolios of early-stage investments, increasing the probability that one or two companies generate exits significant enough to define the strategy’s overall return. SpaceX is not unprecedented in that regard — early-stage investors had comparable experiences with companies that eventually became Apple, Google, and Meta in earlier decades. The pattern holds. The specific outcome is never guaranteed.
That is the honest version of this story: the access matters, the patience matters, and the construction of the portfolio around those bets matters just as much.
Institutions Have Known This for Decades
University endowments, pension funds, sovereign wealth funds, and family offices have allocated capital to private markets for decades. Yale’s endowment, under the late David Swensen, became a widely studied model for its significant weighting toward alternative and private investments — and its long-term performance reflected that discipline.
The gap for individual wealth investors has historically been access and knowledge. Private market investments carried high minimums, limited availability, and structural complexity that put them beyond reach for most individual investors. That is changing. Through disciplined manager selection and institutional-grade partnerships, qualified investors working with the right advisory relationships can now access the same categories of private market investments that were once available only to large institutions.
Want to See How Private Markets Actually Work?
Sometimes the clearest explanations come from the least expected places.
Udayan Mitra, Trajan Wealth’s Chief Investment Officer of Alternatives, uses color-coded candy — yes, candy — to walk through how a diversified private markets portfolio is constructed, why most individual positions carry real risk of loss, and how a well-built portfolio is designed to absorb that reality while still generating meaningful returns over time.
It is one of the more straightforward explanations of private market diversification you will find — built for the investor who has heard the terminology before but wants to understand the underlying logic without a whiteboard full of equations.
The Trade-Off Is Real and Worth Naming
Private markets are structurally illiquid. Capital committed to a private equity or private credit strategy is typically locked up for five to ten years. There is no daily trading, and pricing is not updated on an ongoing basis the way publicly traded securities are priced.
That illiquidity is not a flaw. It is a feature — and it is precisely why private market investments have historically offered a premium return over their public counterparts. Investors are typically compensated for committing capital patiently and enduring the harvesting period required before value is realized.
Illiquidity is not appropriate for every investor or every portion of a portfolio. But for qualified investors with a long enough time horizon and no near-term need for those assets, the trade-off can be structurally advantageous. Understanding where that line falls — and whether it applies to your situation — is the right starting point for any conversation about private markets.
- Private market investments are available to qualified investors only, as defined under applicable securities regulations. They involve significant risk, including the risk of total loss of invested capital. Private market investments are illiquid — capital is typically committed for five to ten years with limited ability to redeem early.
- The Juan Hernandez story is drawn from published news reporting and is presented for illustrative purposes only. His outcome reflects a single individual’s experience with a specific company and is not representative of typical private market results. For every company that produces returns of this magnitude, many more fail to reach commercialization. Past performance does not guarantee future results.
- References to SpaceX in this article reflect Trajan Wealth’s monitoring of private market opportunities as part of our investment evaluation process. This is not a solicitation to invest in SpaceX or any specific security. Any private market investment involves material risk and is subject to the terms of the applicable offering documents.
- All investments involve risk, including the potential loss of principal.
The Question Worth Asking
Juan Hernandez did not have a financial strategy. He had access — and the discipline not to undo it. Most investors will never receive a pre-IPO stock grant through an employer. But access to private markets is no longer limited to employees of the right companies or the largest institutions.
The question is whether your current plan is built to take advantage of it.
If your investments, tax strategy, and estate plan are coordinated — and your advisor has the relationships and the expertise to evaluate private market opportunities alongside everything else — you are positioned to have this conversation. If they are not, you may be leaving a meaningful part of the opportunity set on the table.
At Trajan Wealth, private market investments are evaluated as part of a complete client strategy — alongside portfolio management, tax planning, and estate planning. That coordination is what makes a private markets allocation work — not just whether you qualify, but whether it fits the full picture of your financial life.
If you want to know where you stand, the free financial assessment is the right place to start. It takes about 30 minutes, and it will show you clearly whether a more coordinated approach — one that includes a conversation about private markets — is something worth pursuing. See the Trajan Family Office advantage to understand what that looks like in practice.
