Elon Musk’s SpaceX went public on Friday, exploding onto the scene with a valuation that quickly eclipsed $2 trillion. Things went swimmingly for a while, with shares steadily rising from a debut $150 — a premium of 11 percent over the original asking price — on Friday to well over $200 on Tuesday. But after peaking at $222 Tuesday morning, SpaceX started its first sustained decline of its nascent stock market career, demonstrating that regardless of its starry-eyed hype, investors are in for a chaotic ride on the terrestrial markets.
By the close of the day, the company’s shares were hovering around the $200 mark. It’s far too early to tell where the ticker will move in the coming weeks or months — or, let’s face it, even days — but it’s an interesting inflection point after SpaceX’s IPO finally opened the floodgates.
Slowing investor enthusiasm could have a litany of reasons. The overall bear case is hard to miss, as SpaceX painstakingly pointed out in its original Securities and Exchange Commission filings ahead of its IPO. Despite having a market cap of over $2.6 trillion at the time of writing, which puts it within earshot of Amazon, the company has been burning through billions of dollars, particularly following its merger with Musk’s AI startup xAI, which itself has been incinerating cash at an extraordinary rate.
In its SEC filings, SpaceX also admitted that Musk’s plan to place one million enormous data centers in Earth’s orbit may not be economically feasible, let alone physically possible, casting a long shadow over the now-trillionaire‘s infamously overambitious aspirations.
Put simply, we’re in uncharted territory, with Wall Street firmly standing behind Musk’s bold vision — albeit without any clear sense of a realistic business model or road to profitability.
For now, investors are seemingly elated to be part of the picture. But as Tesla investors know, it’ll be a rocky road. More on SpaceX: It’s Possible That SpaceX Could Collapse Spectacularly