SpaceX stock falls below its IPO price for the first time

Shares slip under the offer price

SpaceX shares fell below their initial public offering price for the first time on Wednesday, dipping under $135 in morning trading before recovering to close at $135.27. The stock had jumped more than 50% in its first days of trading last month, so the move marks a sharp reversal in sentiment toward Elon Musk's rocket and satellite company.

The offering valued SpaceX at $2.2 trillion, making it one of the most valuable listed companies in the world, and briefly made Musk the first trillionaire; his net worth is now around $800 billion. On July 7 the company joined the Nasdaq-100, after a rule change that lets companies enter the index 15 days after listing.

An $86bn raise, then a push into AI

The IPO raised $75 billion initially, and a further $11 billion after underwriters exercised their option for additional shares, for a total of $86 billion — the largest listing in history. SpaceX, based near Austin, Texas, is the world's leading launch provider: its Falcon 9 rocket accounted for the vast majority of satellites launched last year. It is also the largest satellite broadband operator through Starlink.

Much of the investor interest rested on Musk's plans to turn the company into an AI player, including orbiting, solar-powered data centres that would process AI workloads in space. Since listing, SpaceX agreed to buy the AI coding startup Cursor for $60 billion, a deal expected to close in the third quarter, and merged Musk's xAI into the company earlier this year at a $1.25 trillion valuation. The combined business has also begun leasing computing power to Anthropic and Google from two terrestrial data centres it has built.

Investors have questioned the scale of that spending and the debt the company has taken on.

More shares, and a precedent

Further volatility may be ahead: locked-up shares held by current and former employees begin to be released after second-quarter results are published in the coming months. At least 20% of the shares will be freed at that point, and all lockups expire in December.

SpaceX is not the first megacap to trade below its offer price early on. Meta, then named Facebook, fell almost 50% from its $38 IPO price to a low of $19.69 in August 2012 and needed more than 14 months to climb back above it, in July 2013.