SpaceX’s coming market debut will be nothing short of historic. Elon Musk’s private juggernaut is reportedly seeking a valuation north of $2 trillion, eclipsing any company to ever go public. Musk built SpaceX from scratch, defying predictions that spaceflight would belong only to government. From reusable rockets to Mars‑ready spacecraft, he has advanced human flight lightyears beyond what anyone imagined, and now, Americans eager to invest in this next frontier may finally get the chance.
SpaceX’s initial public offering (IPO) stands out as a rare exception that exposes a broader and troubling reality. The United States once brimmed with publicly traded companies inviting everyday Americans to share in their growth. Today, public listings have withered. Fewer firms are going public, and many promising startups prefer to remain private, keeping Main Street investors sidelined while billion‑dollar startups flourish behind closed doors. This decline in shared opportunity is starving the American worker of a stake in the nation’s future.
President Trump’s focus on “Making IPOs Great Again” is a plan to open those doors again. The president’s administration recognizes that a healthy public marketplace is not just about stock prices—it is about ownership, participation, and the renewal of economic democracy.
Under the president’s leadership, Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Paul Atkins has laid out a clear path forward. In his address last fall, Atkins outlined three decisive reforms. First, he called for restoring materiality as the foundation of disclosure rules—so investment choices hinge on genuine economic signals rather than regulatory noise. Second, he proposed depoliticizing shareholder meetings. Third, he urged the importance of shielding innovators from meritless lawsuits while at the same time safeguarding investors from actual fraud. Together, these objectives resemble a roadmap toward freer, fairer, and more dynamic public capital.
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Atkins’ diagnosis is sound. Specifically, the weaponization of securities law in recent decades has driven American startups away from entering public markets. Securities laws were written to protect honest investors and punish genuine deceit. But for too long, trial lawyers and activist claimants have warped those protections into a costly racket. In 2024 alone, trial lawyers pocketed nearly one billion dollars in securities litigation attorneys’ fees. Every fleeting drop in stock price, every internal controversy, every business setback becomes the basis for a lawsuit. These suits don’t build trust in markets; they poison it.
The consequences reach far beyond Wall Street. Innovation zones thrive when entrepreneurs can raise broad‑based capital through IPOs. Instead, they face a gauntlet of legal harassment that punishes ambition. Elon Musk himself has spent years battling weaponized securities class actions designed to target vision rather than wrongdoing. Such tactics chill risk‑taking and keep our most daring industries tethered to private backers instead of the American public.
This imbalance can and must be corrected. Congress should revisit statutory thresholds for securities class actions and create safe harbors for companies acting transparently and in good faith. But legislative motion alone may not be enough. A true turning point could come from the Supreme Court itself. If the Court grants a pending petition in Johnson & Johnson v. San Diego County Employees Retirement Association, challenging the ease with which securities complaints proceed past the pleading stage, it could restore discipline to a field that has lost it. Judicial clarity would slow the flood of baseless filings and reassert that punishment belongs to fraud, not failure.
SpaceX reminds us what a free people can achieve when genius meets opportunity. Its imminent IPO should stir pride not simply in one man’s triumph but in our capacity to renew shared prosperity through open markets. Americans deserve the chance to invest in the technologies that will define our century—artificial intelligence, biotech, a mission to Mars, and other emerging technologies. To seize that chance, we must ensure our public markets work for innovators rather than those who game the system. Chairman Atkins and President Trump have charted the right course. With the Supreme Court posed to consider Johnson & Johnson later this month, it has the opportunity to help re-incentivize public offerings.
By reining in securities lawsuit abuse, America’s IPO pipeline can flow freely again—and those first rockets carrying SpaceX’s ticker symbol skyward may signal something greater: the American dream still burns bright.
Ken Blackwell is the President of the Council for National Policy and an adviser to the Family Research Council. He is the former Treasurer of the State of Ohio and a former Domestic Policy adviser to the Trump transition teams in 2016 and 2024.
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