Nvidia Is Still Retail Investors' Most-Held Stock on Robinhood, but a New Trillion-Dollar Stock Has Entered the Top 10

Over the last 15 years, retail investors have been making their presence felt on Wall Street. The authors of "The Retail Investor Report," published by the University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Law, note that retail investors comprised 25% of equities trading volume in 2021, nearly double the percentage reported in the previous decade.

Thanks to the transparency of Robinhood Markets' retail investor-focused online trading platform, we can track which stocks these everyday investors favor. While artificial intelligence (AI) kingpin Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA) has been a fixture as the most-held stock on Robinhood for quite some time, there's a new trillion-dollar entrant on Robinhood's top-10 leaderboard: Elon Musk's Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) (NASDAQ: SPCX).

Retail investors want their piece of the multitrillion-dollar AI pie

Excluding exchange-traded funds (ETFs), AI plays a foundational role in the growth prospects of Robinhood's most-held stocks. According to estimates from PwC, AI can create $15.7 trillion in global economic value by 2030 -- and retail investors clearly want to claim their piece of the pie.

Buying shares of Nvidia is the easiest way for retail investors to gain exposure. Nvidia's graphics processing units (GPUs) are the backbone of AI-accelerated data centers. CEO Jensen Huang's aggressive GPU development timeline, coupled with the compute superiority of Nvidia's GPUs, has led to a virtual monopoly on AI-accelerating chips used in enterprise data centers.

Absolutely insane.

Nvidia, $NVDA, just guided $108 BILLION in revenue for Q3 alone.

And, this guidance assumes ZERO data center compute revenue from China.

This builds on the record $96.2 billion in revenue posted for last quarter for a projected total of $204.2 billion in 6...

-- The Kobeissi Letter (@KobeissiLetter) August 26, 2026

But this same excitement about AI is likely why SpaceX has jumped to the seventh most-held stock on Robinhood. Musk's company has locked in deals to rent GPU capacity to AI start-up Anthropic and Google parent Alphabet for $1.25 billion/month and $920 million/month, respectively.

Furthermore, SpaceX's mile-long prospectus highlighted a $28.5 trillion addressable market, $26.5 trillion of which traced back to AI.

SpaceX may end up fleecing its retail investors

Although CEO Elon Musk has delivered jaw-dropping long-term gains for his shareholders at Tesla (the third most-held stock on Robinhood), it could be a different story for SpaceX's investors.

Aside from the fact that SpaceX isn't profitable and is burning through a boatload of capital as it ramps up Starship and expands its data center compute capacity, the company's share unlock schedule for select insiders isn't favorable to retail investors.

Usually, a newly public company will prevent its insiders (high-ranking executives, board members, and early investors) from selling their shares for the first 180 calendar days after an initial public offering. SpaceX threw convention aside and employed an accelerated and staggered lockup period that allows eligible insiders to cash out at retail investors' expense.

Great look at the SpaceX shares unlock schedule as well as the potential passive buying schedule from @JSeyff @FrancisSharoon Depending on the early post-IPO returns, this could really play with and disperse the returns of "passive" funds (which is why there's arguably no such... pic.twitter.com/KOuEkJlngF

-- Eric Balchunas (@EricBalchunas) May 28, 2026

What makes this decision even more noteworthy is that SpaceX didn't sell a large percentage of its outstanding shares (OS) when it went public. Whereas most companies going public sell 10% to 25% of their OS, SpaceX sold roughly 555.6 million shares, representing less than 5% of its OS. With each new time- and event-based share-unlock milestone, SpaceX's retail investors can be swamped by newly tradable shares.

While Elon Musk's vision for SpaceX is exciting, the No. 7 holding of Robinhood's retail investors looks like a fleecing waiting to happen.

Sean Williams has positions in Alphabet. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Alphabet, Nvidia, and Tesla. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.