Do you ever watch a TV series and they go back in time to build a story? Let me build one for you.

The year is 1964 and there is a lot of talk about a space stock. It's called COMSAT. COMSAT builds satellites. In June 1964, they go public.

The IPO raised nearly $200 million. It is the largest offering since Ford went public in 1956. Investors scrambled for shares. Brokers had to set strict limits on how many any one person could buy. Some people were buying it just for the stock certificate. The stock opened at $20, jumped to $27 on day one, and would eventually reach $87.

It was called "the stock of the century."

The excitement made sense at first. President Kennedy had signed the Communications Satellite Act two years earlier. The space race was real. COMSAT had already launched the first commercial communications satellite, Early Bird, into orbit. This was the future actually happening.

COMSAT is a case study in what happens when a great story meets investor enthusiasm. The company was real. The technology was real. But the price reflected something beyond the business — a narrative that outran realistic expectations. It reflected the feeling people had about space, about progress, about not wanting to miss out on something historic.

Does this sound familiar?

I think this might be the biggest IPO season I’ve seen in my career. Actually, let’s just say it is. The numbers are staggering, and I graduated college in May of 2000, so that’s saying something.

An Initial Public Offer, or IPO, is the moment a private company opens its doors to public investors for the first time. When I was finishing college, the hot IPOs were companies like Pets.com, remember the sock puppet mascot, and Webvan, an online grocery delivery service that was going to change everything. Anything with a .com took off. The story was compelling, and the prices reflected all of that enthusiasm. Then reality set in. Pets.com went bankrupt within a year of going public. Webvan burned through over a billion dollars before collapsing. The narrative was great, but the business wasn't.

Amazon and Google also went public around that same era, and we all know how those turned out. It’s not that IPOs are bad. It’s that the hype cycle has a way of making it very hard to tell the difference between the next Amazon and the next Pets.com while you’re living inside it.

Fast forward to 2026. This year's class includes SpaceX, OpenAI and Anthropic.  These are names that carry a lot of excitement and even bigger valuations. SpaceX alone is targeting a valuation between $1.75 and $2 trillion.  I'll be honest, I've had a lot of clients ask me about SpaceX specifically, and I get it. I'm genuinely excited to see what the company can do. I think Elon Musk is our generation's once-in-a-generation mind. That's not something I say lightly.