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It's a huge gamble. In 20 years everyone will either agree that it was a huge bubble or that it was a huge opportunity, but without hindsight it's really a huge gamble. I would have been thrilled to buy in during most of their previous private fundraising, but by IPO time the huge upside possibilities they have were clear to everyone, and IMHO that upside is now more than adequately priced in. I'm not planning to directly buy any shares unless there's a big unwarranted dip, and even then my motivation would likely be "I want to help ensure their employees' options are worth what they deserve" more than "I'm using the Kelly criterion to maximize expected utility of my portfolio".
Lesson 1 is very short and yet very effective: "Diversify". Get a NASDAQ-tracking index fund, and you'll have a small piece of SpaceX, but you'll also have enough other weakly-correlated-with-SpaceX stocks that you won't have to worry about losing big if things go bad for SpaceX in particular, just about downturns in tech as a whole or the stock market as a whole.
There's something to be said for the fun of wild gambles over sensible investments, of course. I made my first ETrade account around age 20, picked two stocks, and was so excited by the one that quadrupled that I didn't feel too bad when the other went bankrupt. (And even that was a mini-lesson in diversifying! Imagine if I'd bought the same two in serial rather than in parallel!) Just remember that high-variance gambles, even positive-expected-value ones, are the sort of thing you want to do with disposable income when you're 20, not with base retirement savings or the kids' college funds when you're 40.
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