UFC is set to hold its first event on the White House South Lawn with a mixed martial arts show timed for President Donald Trump’s 80th birthday and the celebration of the nation’s 250th anniversary.
UFC Freedom 250 is set for Sunday night.
Click to Gallery
Construction continues on the arena on the South Lawn of the White House for a future UFC mixed martial arts fight, Saturday, June 6, 2026, in Washington. (AP Photo/John McDonnell)
Construction continues on the UFC mixed martial arts arena on the South Lawn of the White House, left, and the ballroom, Saturday, June 6, 2026, in Washington. (AP Photo/John McDonnell)
A man rests on the grass near the Washington Monument as workers continue building the stage for a future UFC fight on the South Lawn of the White House, seen center top, Monday, June 8, 2026, in Washington. (AP Photo/Rod Lamkey, Jr.)
Workers continue building the stage for a future UFC fight on the South Lawn of the White House, left, Tuesday, June 9, 2026, in Washington, as work also continues on the construction of the ballroom, right. (AP Photo/Cliff Owen)
Workers continue building the stage for a future UFC fight on the South Lawn of the White House in Washington, Tuesday, June 9, 2026. (AP Photo/Cliff Owen)
UFC CEO Dana White is friends with the president and the two have discussed for more than a year the idea of bringing mixed martial arts to the White House.
Their relationship dates to UFC’s infancy as White reorganized the company and led its rise into national prominence.
The cage and stage will themselves be surrounded by thousands of temporary seats, including ringside space for a full marching band that can set the entire scene to blaring music. The Zac Brown Band will perform the National Anthem.
The fight card is part of a series of events celebrating the semiquincentennial of the Declaration of Independence’s signing on July 4, 1776. Other planned events include an IndyCar race that will pass by the White House.
The main card airs live only on Paramount+ at 8 p.m. Eastern on Sunday.
There was some initial discussion that the show would be simulcast on television via CBS. The show instead will only air domestically on the subscription service. Paramount, which is controlled by the Ellison family, also close allies of Trump, this year became the new home to UFC events across the United States
It was a shift away from UFC’s long-time pay-per-view model. Paramount and UFC parent company TKO said the change will allow the mixed martial arts programming to reach more consumers nationwide.
Paramount+ plans start at $8.99 a month.
The card has been panned by fans online as underwhelming and features just two championship fights.
Brazil’s Alex Pereira will meet France’s Ciryl Gane for the interim UFC heavyweight title. Spanish-Georgian lightweight champion Ilia Topuria then takes on interim champ Justin Gaethje, one of just two Americans who currently hold even a share of the UFC’s 11 championship belts.
There are five other fights on the main card that include former title-fight participants Michael Chandler and Derrick Lewis and former 135-pound champion Sean O'Malley.
White says the outdoor show will go on rain or shine.
The mid-week forecast on Weather.com called for rain showers early with overcast skies late Sunday and temperatures around 70 degrees around the time of the first fight.
The main venue has 4,500 seats but thousands more are expected to watch in the open air at the Ellipse, a prominent public park south of the White House.
AP MMA: https://apnews.com/hub/mixed-martial-arts
Construction continues on the arena on the South Lawn of the White House for a future UFC mixed martial arts fight, Saturday, June 6, 2026, in Washington. (AP Photo/John McDonnell)
Construction continues on the UFC mixed martial arts arena on the South Lawn of the White House, left, and the ballroom, Saturday, June 6, 2026, in Washington. (AP Photo/John McDonnell)
A man rests on the grass near the Washington Monument as workers continue building the stage for a future UFC fight on the South Lawn of the White House, seen center top, Monday, June 8, 2026, in Washington. (AP Photo/Rod Lamkey, Jr.)
Workers continue building the stage for a future UFC fight on the South Lawn of the White House, left, Tuesday, June 9, 2026, in Washington, as work also continues on the construction of the ballroom, right. (AP Photo/Cliff Owen)
Workers continue building the stage for a future UFC fight on the South Lawn of the White House in Washington, Tuesday, June 9, 2026. (AP Photo/Cliff Owen)
NEW YORK (AP) — When SpaceX makes its debut on the U.S. stock market, it wants smaller-pocketed, mom-and-pop investors to play a big role in what may be the biggest IPO ever.
Elon Musk’s rocket company, formally known as Space Exploration Technologies Corp., is steering some of its initial public offering of stock directly to what are called “retail” investors. These are people who buy stocks in a brokerage account on their phone, not pension funds or other big “institutional” investors routing orders to their professional trading desks.
Here are some things to keep in mind as the IPO approaches:
Most IPOs offer only 5% to 10% of the total offering to retail investors, according to Fidelity. In this case, though, it could be up to 30%. SpaceX expects retail investors to participate in its IPO through Charles Schwab, Fidelity, Robinhood, SoFi and E-Trade by Morgan Stanley.
At Fidelity, investors with as little as $2,000 in their accounts could potentially snag SpaceX shares in the IPO. That’s down from account minimums of $100,000 or even $500,000 that Fidelity has for other equity offerings.
Demand from investors may be so high in this IPO that not everyone indicating interest will actually get a share.
Given all the hype around SpaceX, temptation could be high to grab shares in the IPO and sell them quickly if a frenzy sends its price spiking. But brokerages have policies to block investors from future offerings if they dump shares bought in an IPO quickly, like within a couple weeks.
Potentially high interest from retail investors following the IPO is one reason SpaceX is warning that its stock price could be volatile. These investors aren’t known for moving as meticulously as a pension fund, which is trying to build money for payments it must make years or decades in the future.
It’s retail investors, after all, who helped drive GameStop and other “meme stocks” to market-bending heights in 2021 that professional investors called irrational.
The typical IPO has seen a 7% jump in its first day of trading, from 1980 through 2025, according to Jay Ritter, an IPO expert and a professor at the University of Florida’s Warrington College of Business.
But IPOs tend to lag similar-sized peers in the ensuing five years, not including their first day of trading. They do so by an average of 3.6% per year, according to Ritter.
It’s very expensive to launch things out of the earth’s atmosphere and to construct huge AI data centers, and SpaceX has built up $29.1 billion in debt, as of the end of March.
The company also lost $4.9 billion last year and another $4.3 billion through the first three months of 2026. It acknowledges that it “may not achieve profitability in the future.”
Over the long term, a stock’s price tends to track with how much profit the company is making.
You could end up owning some of SpaceX even if you never intended to. Consider the many people who own shares of the popular QQQ exchange-traded fund, which tracks the Nasdaq 100 index and has roughly $460 billion in total assets.
Historically, the Nasdaq 100 index would wait until each December to add new members in an annual reconstitution to make sure it includes the 100 largest non-financial companies on the Nasdaq. But Nasdaq recently made changes to allow some big companies to enter the Nasdaq 100 index after just 15 trading days.
That means if SpaceX’s IPO is as successful as expected, it could quickly join both the Nasdaq 100 and QQQ fund, all while QQQ holders do nothing on their own.
The company behind the more popular S&P 500 index, though, is not making changes that would allow SpaceX faster entry.
In its IPO, SpaceX is offering 555.6 million shares of its “Class A” stock. Each of these shares gives an investor one vote on matters that shareholders decide. That includes such weighty things as who is on the board of directors overseeing the CEO.
This IPO is not offering what are called “Class B” shares, each of which give its holder 10 votes. Musk, meanwhile, owns so many of those shares that he by himself could control more than 82% of all the stock’s voting power following the IPO.
In filings with U.S. securities regulators, SpaceX acknowledges the potential for conflicts of interest between it and Musk, along with other companies he owns, such as Tesla.
Officials from pension funds for firefighters, teachers and other workers in California and New York sent a letter to SpaceX last month decrying some of the provisions in its IPO, including “super voting shares,” mandatory arbitration of shareholder claims instead of the possibility of lawsuits and how much power Musk will hold over the company.
They said they could become owners of SpaceX stock because they hold index funds, which automatically buy stocks after they get included in certain indexes.
If Musk is able to control so much of the voting power on the board of directors, it would make him tremendously powerful atop SpaceX, “essentially making him unfireable without his own consent,” the CEO of California Public Employees’ Retirement System, the New York state comptroller and the New York City comptroller wrote in their letter.
“This level of insulation from accountability is virtually unheard of among any other large U.S. issuer whose governing documents foreclose accountability to public owners on these terms.”
SpaceX plans to trade under the ticker symbol “SPCX.” That’s very close to “SPCE,” which is the symbol for Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic Holdings.
FILE - Elon Musk attends the finals for the NCAA wrestling championship, March 22, 2025, in Philadelphia. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke, File)
FILE - A Falcon 9 SpaceX heavy rocket lifts off from pad 39A at the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla., Tuesday, Feb. 6, 2018. (AP Photo/John Raoux, File)
