A $200 billion pension fund just looked at SpaceX’s price tag and said no thanks.

North Carolina State Treasurer Brad Briner announced on CNBC’s Squawk Box that the state’s pension fund will not purchase SpaceX shares ahead of the company’s highly anticipated IPO. The reason is straightforward: at a $1.75 trillion valuation, Briner believes the rocket company leaves “little room for future gains.”

The math behind the pass

SpaceX’s upcoming IPO is expected to raise at least $75 billion in an all-primary offering, which would make it one of the largest public listings in history. Briner described SpaceX’s valuation as “fully priced” and noted he’s been wrestling with a “pricing issue” for over a year.

Instead of chasing SpaceX in the private market, Briner is directing capital toward AI companies. Specifically, the fund is investing in firms like OpenAI and Anthropic. His stated goal is “high single-digit, predictable returns” for the fund’s beneficiaries.

Briner isn’t ruling out SpaceX entirely. He indicated the pension fund would seek exposure to the company through standard public index funds after the IPO completes.

The crypto angle you didn’t expect

Tokenized shares of SpaceX have been made available on cryptocurrency platforms including Bybit and Kraken, with subscription windows running from June 7 to June 11.

North Carolina’s pension fund itself has a crypto connection worth noting. Legislation passed in 2025 permits the fund to allocate up to 5% of its assets to digital assets. At 5% of a $200 billion fund, that ceiling would theoretically allow for $10 billion in crypto exposure. Briner, however, has taken a far more conservative approach, allocating only about 0.5% of the fund to Bitcoin as a hedge against volatility.

What this means for investors

For crypto market participants, the tokenized SpaceX shares represent a use case that tokenization advocates have been pitching for years: real assets, fractionalized and distributed on blockchain rails, available through crypto-native platforms like Bybit and Kraken.

The tension between Briner’s cautious Bitcoin allocation and his willingness to invest in AI companies reveals how traditional finance currently ranks its alternative asset preferences. Bitcoin, at least for this particular fund, remains a small hedging instrument rather than a core holding, despite legislative room to go much bigger.

The SpaceX IPO is set for mid-June 2026. Briner’s stance reflects a fiduciary who looked at what could be the largest IPO ever and decided the current $1.75 trillion asking price left insufficient room for the “high single-digit, predictable returns” his beneficiaries require.