For years, meme stocks were largely driven by narrative, momentum and internet-fueled speculation. Former Goldman Sachs Group, Inc. (GS) and JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM) executive Chan Ahn believes a future tokenized SpaceX market could look very different — and potentially much bigger.
In an exclusive interview with MarketDash, the Tessera PE CEO argued that a tokenized version of Elon Musk's SpaceX could combine "meme-stock velocity" with institutional-grade fundamentals, creating a new category of investing altogether.
"Meme stocks are narrative trades detached from fundamentals," Ahn said. "Tokenized SpaceX is the opposite."
Ahn pointed to Starlink's reported multibillion-dollar revenue run rate, SpaceX's launch dominance and defense contracts as reasons retail demand for the company may be fundamentally different from the speculative frenzy surrounding names such as GameStop Corp (GME) during the COVID-19 pandemic-era retail boom.
Retail Demand Could Look Very Different
The bigger shift, according to Ahn, is structural.
Traditional IPO systems intentionally throttle participation through broker allocations, minimum purchase sizes and geographic restrictions. Tokenization removes many of those bottlenecks.
"When you make SpaceX available to 500 million-plus global wallet holders, at any size, 24/7, with no allocation lottery — you're unlocking demand that the traditional IPO infrastructure was never built to absorb," Ahn said.
That demand may already be emerging.
Ahn said Tessera's T-SpaceX launch earlier this year was "oversubscribed within six hours" despite minimal marketing and limited mainstream awareness.
The Next Evolution Of Retail Investing?
The broader backdrop may also be helping fuel interest. Tokenized real-world assets have grown to more than $27 billion as of April 2026, according to Ahn, as institutions and crypto-native platforms increasingly experiment with blockchain-based ownership structures.
For now, SpaceX remains private.
But if tokenized pre-IPO investing gains traction, the line between public and private markets could begin to blur much faster than Wall Street expected.
