SpaceX investors have gone from celebration to outright concern in its first month as a publicly traded company.
When shares of the company co-founded and led by Elon Musk first became available for individuals to buy on the public stock market on June 12, there was an investor frenzy.
Although the company priced each of its shares at $135, the price immediately rose to $150 on the first day and peaked at $176 before closing at $160.95.
This established SpaceX as the largest initial public offering (IPO) ever.
The following week, its shares rose even further, reaching an intraday high of $225, meaning it overtook Amazon and Microsoft in total market cap.
“Every company Elon Musk touches, people get excited,” said Keith Snyder, an analyst at investment research firm CFRA. “But it was also the first time people felt like they were able to invest in something that was being marketed as an AI play.”
Willy Lee, an investor at Neostellar, which facilitates individual investors to put money into private companies, agreed that much of the excitement around the IPO was around artificial intelligence (AI).
“Everyone saw SpaceX as an AI story,” he said.
SpaceX earlier this year acquired Musk’s AI start-up xAI, which was recently renamed SpaceXAI, external and is known for its controversial chatbot Grok, and it has also begun leasing data center capacity to other tech companies.