Lots of talk about SpaceX investors needing an exit capital and using the retail investors to cash out. Let me try to make a case for an alternative scenario.
First, these folks generate a lot of wealth from this price inflation. I bet they themselves won't believe how ridiculous the numbers have gotten and how much wealth they have generated thanks to SpaceX.
Second, they are in the business of getting loans against their equity using the equity as a collateral. For instance, there was the news yesterday that Softbank tried to use their OpenAI stake as collateral for a 6B loan (which they were gonna use to invest more into OpenAI but they ended up getting rejected by the lenders). This is harder to do if their equity is not traded in public markets. You cannot get big loans against equity that the lenders cannot cash out from. But if the stocks are in publicly traded markets, then that's another story. The equity would be considered highly liquid and would be subject to minimal discounting. You would end up with one of the highest types of colletorals essentially from which you can print money from with a mimimal borrowing cost.
All they need to do is to keep the stock price high, which is easy on a 5% float. I wouldn't be surprised that the major investors don't support the stock heavily below a certain price. If I had a large enough stake, or if I was managing one of these major sovereign funds I wouldn't even mind buying some more from the IPO to keep the price high.
So yeah, there is definitely a lot of manipulation going on but I am not sure if the plans are as straightforward as we make it to be given the complexity of the financial options that are available these days. I highly doubt we will get instant gratification here and will be able to laugh at these foolish investors who after all generated a huge imaginary net worth thanks to their equity in the remaining 95% of SpaceX.