To infinity, and beyond.

Aerospace and satellite communications giant SpaceX is expected to begin trading on the Nasdaq this Friday at $135 per share, valuing the company at roughly $1.8 trillion and making it the largest IPO in history. While investor demand is expected to be intense, advisors are not only taking on varied roles but also testing different approaches to client exposure. Some are buying in directly, others are relying on funds and a few aren’t touching the stock at all. Others are simply helping SpaceX employees manage concentrated, and valuable, holdings.

Give It to Me Straight

While most investors will eventually gain exposure to SpaceX through broad-market ETFs and mutual funds, many clients want to own the stock outright. “Some clients prefer holding individual stocks only,” said Tim Urie, chief growth officer at Legacy Edge Advisors. “We have some that don’t hold any ETFs or mutual funds.”

Urie’s firm also uses pre-IPO vehicles to give accredited investors access to private companies before they go public, a trend he expects to accelerate as firms stay private longer. “Pre-IPO vehicles will become more prevalent to cater to high-net-worth investors that want access to companies with strong growth potential that aren’t available in the public markets,” he told Advisor Upside.

Paper Millionaires

Thousands of current and former SpaceX employees already hold company equity, creating a different challenge: How to diversify without triggering a massive tax bill.

• More than 1,000 current and former employees have approached firms including Morgan Stanley and Creative Planning about managing their assets, Bloomberg reported.
• The group, whose holdings are estimated to be worth as much as $20 billion, is reportedly seeking a discounted advisory fee of 0.5% rather than the traditional 1%.

For those clients, separately managed accounts may offer a solution, said Josh Rogers, senior client portfolio manager at Invesco. “SMAs have generally been seen as a great way to continue to get access to broader market exposure, and potentially some excess returns, while also getting tax benefits that can help clients be more flexible around selling,” Rogers said.

He noted that SMAs allow advisors to gradually reduce concentrated stock positions while using tax-loss harvesting to offset gains. Alternative strategies, such as options or exchange funds, may be less practical initially because options markets take time to develop liquidity and exchange funds often come with capacity limits and lengthy lockups.

Stay Light-Years Away. Some advisors are steering clear altogether. “IPO performance over the past few years hasn’t been particularly good,” said Bryan Byrer, founder of Millennial Financial Planning. Byrer argues that SpaceX’s valuation may be difficult to justify and cited a Morningstar estimate valuing the company at $63 per share, roughly 53% below the anticipated IPO price. He also noted that the investment products he uses emphasize profitability. “I’d be surprised if the stock got captured in any of the large-cap funds I use,” he said.

No harm, no foul? Not quite.

The Supreme Court ruled unanimously last week in favor of the Securities and Exchange Commission in a case testing whether the regulator must prove investors suffered quantifiable financial losses in order to force disgorgement of allegedly ill-gotten gains. It doesn’t have to.

The decision in Sripetch v. Securities and Exchange Commission preserved disgorgement as one of the SEC’s most potent enforcement weapons, according to Jose Lopez, a partner at Dorsey Whitney. Notably, however, the ruling did not directly address broader questions about the appropriate use of disgorgement, which is traditionally seen as a means of returning assets to wronged investors, versus the assessment of penalties, which are paid to the government to deter future wrongdoing. Securities lawyers can dispute the amount and nature of disgorgement in cases where there’s some ambiguity about who was harmed, arguing that any request for disgorgement is really a penalty in disguise, but they will need to do so under a framework that remains favorable to the SEC.

“The unanimous decision, which is rare these days, sends a clear message that the core pillar of the SEC’s mission of protecting the investing public is not a partisan issue,” Lopez told Advisor Upside.

SCOTUS Backs SEC

At the heart of the ruling is an SEC civil enforcement action alleging Ongkaruck Sripetch engaged in fraudulent pump-and-dump schemes involving penny stocks. Sripetch, who first consented to judgment and agreed that the district court overseeing the case could order disgorgement, subsequently objected when the SEC sought more than $4.1 million. He argued that disgorgement was unavailable absent proof that specific investors suffered quantifiable financial injuries that can be calculated and compensated with money.

The district court ultimately awarded disgorgement and the Ninth Circuit later affirmed, ruling that the SEC need not prove pecuniary harm to obtain disgorgement. Upon appeal to the Supreme Court, the justices reasoned that “traditional equitable principles” allow a wrongdoer’s unlawful profits to be stripped even when victims cannot show specific corresponding financial losses. That’s a big deal, according to Lewis and others, especially in the wake of other recent cases that have constrained the SEC’s enforcement powers.

Overall, disgorgement remains a key enforcement tool for the SEC:

• In 2025, the agency obtained orders for monetary relief of $10.8 billion in disgorgement and prejudgment interest.
• An additional $7.2 billion in civil penalties was also assessed.

Not Categorical. It’s notable that the court declined to impose a categorical monetary loss requirement, according to an analysis by attorneys at Sullivan and Cromwell. That means practitioners should not assume that conduct appearing “victimless” will avoid disgorgement exposure, particularly where the SEC can show ill-gotten gains and identify investors whose legally protected interests were violated.

Hello. Is it me you’re looking for?

Lisa Salvi, a managing director in Charles Schwab’s Advisor Services unit, isn’t a coder, designer or branding expert by trade, but that may not matter much in the age of artificial intelligence. Experimenting with large language models Claude, ChatGPT and Gemini, Salvi was recently able to mock up an entire brand for a hypothetical wealth firm offering a website and app in virtually no time at all, saving what could’ve been as much as $1.5 million. “To do this would’ve taken weeks, a lot of back and forth, photo shoots and a lot of incredible thinking,” she said during a presentation at a Schwab AI summit last week. The fake website looked clean and inviting, but it was optimized to be found by artificial intelligence.

Search engine optimization has long been a branding priority for advisors. If they want to be at the top of Google search when a potential client is looking for an advisor, firms need to make sure their website’s keywords, images, meta descriptions and more are the best they can be. But now, with the rise of answer engine optimization and generative engine optimization, firms are going to have to work extra hard to increase their online visibility. “It’s a huge opportunity for firms to lean into that now and start taking the very specific actions that will make them citable by LLMs,” Salvi told Advisor Upside. If an advisor is going to use an LLM for coding and designing a website, she recommends using the paid enterprise versions of the programs, not the free ones.

SE-Oh, Wow

Advisors didn’t get into the profession because they’re computer whizzes. So, we’ll try to break this down without getting too techy:

• AEO, or answer engine optimization, is making sure your content and website get sourced to provide quick answers. For example, if someone searches “What is a Roth IRA?” on Google, a concise answer could be pulled from your website.

• GEO, or generative engine optimization, concerns having LLMs like ChatGPT and Gemini learn from your content. The next time someone asks Grok how to create a budget tailored to their personal finances, the answer could be based on your thought leadership.

Easy Pickings. Salvi said an FAQ page is low-hanging fruit for increasing visibility to AI. “[LLMs] love a question and answer format. That’s a very easy thing that you can add to your website today.” Plenty of LLMs are trained on significant amounts of Reddit data. However, that is declining, and Salvi encourages advisors to focus their energy on LinkedIn content, getting quoted in media publications (hey, that’s us) and maybe starting a podcast to help increase both AEO and GEO. “When I look at all of those opportunities and all of the things advisors can do to enhance their visibility to AI, it gets me very excited for the future,” she said.