SpaceX's newly listed stock started trading Friday morning, after an initial public offering that shattered records and likely made CEO Elon Musk the world's first trillionaire.
Shares in SpaceX, listed on the Nasdaq under the SPCX ticker, opened trading at $150 apiece, 11% above the IPO price of $135.
The stock bounced around in the first few minutes, trading as high as $168.75, up 25% from its IPO price. It has since retreated to $165.
The company has already raised some $75 billion selling more than 555 million shares at its offer price of $135, making it the biggest IPO in history.
As excitement built, Musk was in Starbase, Texas, behind what looked like a Nasdaq-branded podium, while a couple of SpaceX executives, including its President Gwynne Shotwell and Chief Financial Officer Bret Johnsen rang the opening bell in New York's Nasdaq Stock Market.
SpaceX is not short of ambition for how it will use the money. In a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the company said it wants to expand its flagship rocket and satellite communications businesses, and is doubling down on a pivot toward artificial intelligence.
Earlier this year, it acquired Musk's AI startup xAI. SpaceX has plans to expand its data centers on Earth, develop AI microchips and launch what it calls "orbital AI compute infrastructure" — data centers in space.
At the center of it all is Musk, who has an iron grip on the company as chairman of the board and chief executive officer. Musk also holds roughly 85% of shareholder voting power.
The IPO price of $135 a share put SpaceX's value north of $1.75 trillion, making it instantly one of the world's biggest listed companies on its first day on the market.
The company is not profitable, though. Its IPO prospectus reported a net loss of $4.3 billion in the first quarter of this year, and critics have questioned its stratospheric valuation. Morningstar valued it at just $780 billion based on a discounted cash flow model, a widely used approach to assessing the value of companies.
Morningstar analysts Nicolas Owens and Suryansh Sharma wrote that uncertainty is "very high" when it comes to SpaceX's business, and its governance profile under Musk, who also runs Tesla and other companies, is complicated. "The company faces substantial risks related to strategic execution, technological evolution, market dynamics, regulations, AI buildout, and key-person dependency," they wrote earlier this month.
First of 3 massive IPOs expected this year
The SpaceX IPO is the first of three big tests of investor appetite for AI-related technology companies. OpenAI, which makes ChatGPT, and Anthropic, creator of the Claude AI models, have both filed paperwork with the Securities and Exchange Commission signaling intent to list shares. Analysts say that could happen this fall.
All three companies are huge, and AI is taking the world by storm, but big question marks hang over future profitability. To date, they have been burning cash to develop artificial intelligence and subsidize usership.
Songyee Yoon, managing partner at Principal Venture Partners, a fund that focuses on AI, cautions that this is still a novel technology, and it's not clear yet which companies will turn out the most commercial and useful models.
The introduction of such a new technology, she says, "comes with a lot of kind of frothy valuation and hype."
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