SpaceX briefly dips below its $135 IPO price as Musk hype cools

SpaceX shares touched their $135 IPO price for the first time on Wednesday, wiping out the 50%-plus surge the stock posted in its opening days last month. The stock recovered to close at $135.27, but the intraday slide underscores fading investor enthusiasm for what was the largest IPO ever — a raise of roughly $86 billion that briefly valued the company at $2.2 trillion and made Musk, for a short window, the world’s first trillionaire. His net worth has since fallen to about $800 billion.

Much of the original hype rested on Musk’s pitch to turn the rocket and Starlink broadband company into an AI heavyweight, including plans for solar-powered orbiting data centers. Since going public, SpaceX has leaned into that story: it folded xAI into the company, agreed to buy AI coding startup Cursor for $60 billion, and began leasing compute from two terrestrial data centers to rivals including Anthropic and Google. Investors, meanwhile, have grown wary of the company’s aggressive spending and debt load.

More downward pressure is likely. At least 20% of employee-held shares unlock after second-quarter results, with all lockups expiring in December — a flood of supply that could push the price lower. The article notes a precedent: Facebook fell nearly 50% below its 2012 IPO price before taking more than a year to recover.