SpaceX stock erases all its gains and slides below IPO price in intraday trading

https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2026-07-16/spacex-stock-erases-gains-slides-below-ipo-price-in-intraday-trading

314 273 7 days ago

throw0101d3• 6 days ago

IPOs are generally not a good investment, at least not relative to average market return:

However, a year later, we see that the majority of companies are either outperforming or underperforming the market by more than 10%. We also see that more companies are underperforming than beating the index (the red bars stretch below the 50% line).
That seems to indicate that for some companies, the initial IPO enthusiasm wanes or expected earnings are not met, and investors reprice the IPO to reflect the actual, slower growth of the company.
Three years after their IPO, we calculate that almost two-thirds of IPOs are underperforming the market, with most (64%) more than 10% behind the market’s returns.

* https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/what-happens-to-ipos-over-th...

56% of IPOs bought at the offer price lost money after 3 years. That number rises to 57% after five years. The numbers are higher when bought at the first day closing price: 60% lost money after 3 and 5 years. Worse than a coin flip.
Only 19% of IPOs doubled or more after three years and 22% after 5 years when bought at the offering price. The numbers were worse when bought at the closing price.
Of course, the lottery-like returns were possible, but it amounted to about 0.4% of all IPOs after 3 years and 1% after five years.

* https://novelinvestor.com/the-hype-and-hot-air-around-ipos/

Interview with a researcher that has looked at IPOs over the last few decades:

We’ve previously compared IPOs to lotteries that are prone to inflated valuations and low returns. Today we welcome “Mr. IPO,” Professor Jay Ritter onto the show for a deeper dive into IPO performance, for his insights into SPACs, and to hear his research into why economic growth doesn’t correlate with stock returns. Early in the episode, Jay unpacks how long-term IPO returns perform against first-day trading. While exploring the role that venture capital plays in tech IPOs, Jay talks about why negative earnings don’t affect tech IPOs in the short-term before sharing how skewness factors tend to impact young companies. Reflecting on how IPOs are usually underpriced, Jay discusses how the interests of companies are not aligned with the interests of IPO underwriters. After looking into IPO allocation, Jay compares the 2020 ‘hot IPO market’ with the internet bubble of the late 90s. Later, we ask Jay about what special-purpose acquisition companies (SPACs) are and why they’ve exploded in recent years. His answers highlight their investing benefits, risks, and why SPACs might be a better option for companies than IPOs. We examine how SPACs have historically performed and then jump into our next topic; why economic growth isn’t a good indicator that a country is worth investing in. He touches on why returns don’t correlate with economic growth, the place of capital gains and dividend yields when investing abroad, and how innovations in an industry can lead to higher stock returns. We wrap up our conversation by asking Jay for his take on whether the stock market is efficient before hearing how he defines success in his life. Tune in to hear our incredible and informative talk with Jay Ritter.

* https://rationalreminder.ca/podcast/139

Picking individual winning stocks can be hard:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Random_Walk_Down_Wall_Street

intrasight2• 6 days ago

Many IPO's have the same trajectory that SpaceX did - first going up steeply and then dropping steeply. So there's certainly money to be made if you get the timing right but that is always the challenge.

throw0101d3• 6 days ago

Worth considering that "trading" and "investing" are different words. :)

paoliniluis• 6 days ago

The IPO was meant for the VCs to cash out as all fundamentals were completely irrational, but seems like no one cares about cash flow and profitability anymore during QE times. Dumb money will keep being dumb I guess

vv_• 6 days ago

If no one cared about cash flow and profitability wouldn't SpaceX stock go up instead of down?

mothballed4• 6 days ago

People cared after the IPO but initially in far less informed circles I constantly heard from lower sophisticated investors bragging about how they'd been allocated X shares like they were Pokemon trading cards they managed to snag. They weren't very sensitive to the price, only to brag to their friends they had snagged them. After the shiny wore off and no one cared about how cool they were, they sold them.

gleenn• 6 days ago

I think one thing to point out is "everyone" in this context is probably the broader market, but the stock holdings aren't distributed uniformly. A few large investors could actually be sophisticated and unload a fortune and the rest of the shareholders could still largely still ignore fundamentals and suffer large losses. The broad market can be ignorant and the stock can (and is) be down, both things can be true.

dgellow• 6 days ago

The company is still overvalued by a pretty massive multiplier

throw0101d3• 6 days ago

If no one cared about cash flow and profitability wouldn't SpaceX stock go up instead of down?

In addition to looking at the "fundamentals" of a company like cash flow and profitability, there is also a 'meta-game' that traders (as opposed to investors) have to look at:

A Keynesian beauty contest is a metaphorical beauty contest in which judges are rewarded for selecting the most popular choices among all judges, rather than those they may personally find the most attractive. This idea is often applied in financial markets, whereby investors could profit more by buying whichever stocks they think other investors will buy, rather than the stocks that have fundamentally the best value, because when other people buy a stock, they bid up the price, allowing an earlier investor to cash out with a profit, regardless of whether the price increases are supported by its fundamentals and theoretical arguments.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keynesian_beauty_contest

"whereby investors could profit more by buying whichever stocks they think other investors will buy, rather than the stocks that have fundamentally the best value"

sigmoid10• 6 days ago

The IPO featured less than 5% of shares as free float. So the investors are still in pretty deep with their hands tied until lock-up restrictions expire. The IPO was more of a quick, public financing round for their AI branch than an exit for SpaceX VCs.

mr_toad• 6 days ago

As those lock-ups expire I only see the stock sliding further. Still, the very early investors will probably make bank, with the retail investors holding the bag.

Many of those early investors would have invested in a rocket company, I doubt many of them were overjoyed to be saddled with all the debts from an AI company and Twitter.

skywal_l• 6 days ago

Is it possible that people who don't care about short term profitability but still want a strategic ownership of the company bought at a high price on IPO day and now that the day traders are in, speculation will readjust the price to short term values? The change of price just reflect the different buyer profiles.

SpaceX is a pretty important company not just for "the market" but also for many other things (see Russia/Ukraine war).

Fair warning: I know nothing about all this.

Zigurd7• 6 days ago

There are no "pretty important" companies with the relatively meager revenues SpaceX has got.

mythz• 6 days ago

Buying at a high price just gives money to the early investors, the company itself doesn't get richer unless they're doing a raising capital round, but after an IPO you're just giving liquidity (+ profit) to early investors.

If you wait till the price comes down to its natural level, you'll be able to buy more of the company for less money.

hodder2• 6 days ago

But why would you want to buy a company where the valuation reflects an extremely optimistic outcome already? Basically you are assuming obscene growth from SpaceX in AI, datacenters, rocket launches etc just to for the stock to go nowhere. The market cap was over 2T!

When you buy equities, if the company turns out shockingly successful beyond most peoples probable expectations you dont simply want your investment to just stay flat, you want to make multiples of your money. In order to do this, you simply cant start from a 2T marketcap. No company worth 2T can make you 100x your money or even 10x or 5x your money in a reasonable amount of time given the overall size of the economy.

maxerickson• 6 days ago

What is your idea of strategic ownership? Musk has voting control, everyone else is along for the ride.

kayo_20211030• 6 days ago

It's all a bit of a mess with the consolidation of multiple businesses.

SpaceX is a pretty important company not just for "the market" but also for many other things (see Russia/Ukraine war)

Starlink, which was rolled in to SpaceX, is/was profitable and it is a factor in Ukraine.

The rocket division is not profitable, but I sense that there might be a path to a profitably operating business.

As for the X/xAI piece, who knows? Long-term it seems like a moon-shot. I appreciate the irony that it's in the wrong division.

SecretDreams• 6 days ago

SpaceX is a pretty important company not just for "the market" but also for many other things (see Russia/Ukraine war).

True, if Twitter and xAI stopped existing, there would be an uproar from all the suddenly unemployed disinformation botters.

dist-epoch• 6 days ago

SpaceX / Musk is the company which will build the Dyson Swarm. This is an opportunity to get in at the ground level.

marcosdumay2• 6 days ago

No one can care about fundamentals in QE times. If you stay out of the market just because nothing there is valuable, you will lose your money to the hidden inflation and won't be able to buy anything there when you want in.

In normal inflation you can at least buy commodities. But the US economy is organized in a way that will concentrate the money on stocks, not commodities.

jrk• 6 days ago

The Fed transitioned from QE to tightening almost 5 years ago.

electriclove• 6 days ago

You've been through this before and have the scars or have seen them on others. It is hard to explain to those who have not. Though they only need look at a historical chart.

cmrdporcupine• 6 days ago

Since when are we still in "QE times"?

chorsestudios• 6 days ago

Not sure if people not caring about cash flow and profitability is applicable across the board, it might just be because SpaceX is one of Elon's companies which seem to defy traditional financial analytic standards.

pfisherman• 6 days ago

My understanding is that an ideally priced IPO should not move much from the opening price in the near term. If it pops it means they left money on the table. If it drops, then I am not sure what the implication is exactly?

Now I think SpaceX is massively overhyped, but is the share price returning to IPO opening not just a sign that the banks accurately estimated something?

ubermonkey• 6 days ago

If it drops, then I am not sure what the implication is exactly?

Surely you understand it's inverse of an IPO that jumps after intro, right?

SpaceX is not seen by investors as worth its price. This is because it is not.

lapcat2• 6 days ago

an ideally priced IPO

Ideally priced from the perspective of pre-IPO investors.

This seems like an argument for outside investors not to buy IPO stock.

budsniffer952• 6 days ago

There is no should or should not.

Look at the financials and the price, and you as an individual get to determine if it's worth buying (or selling).

philipallstar• 6 days ago

Many IPOs slide below the initial price. This isn't a SpaceX thing.

saltwatercowboy• 6 days ago

If the NASDAQ changes their inclusion rules to court SpaceX... it sort of does become all about SpaceX.

lesuorac• 6 days ago

In general terms you want the stock to pop.

Your bank will get a ton of orders from institutional investors of how many shares they want at a given price. You will have a preference as to which investors you want on your cap table. Almost all of those investors value your stock less than the "pop price" (which includes the investors you want on your cap table). So you'll need to target the IPO below the "pop price" so you get them on your cap table.

You're probably picking investors based on how likely they'll let you stay on the board / CEO and if you think they're just going to dump the stock during the IPO (which would be bad for it's price).

So (unlike the SpaceX IPO) you're going to sell relatively little shares to retail who will buy at any price which during the opening days will cause it to spike as the demand (in nominal dollars) per share is beyond the IPO price target.

but is the share price returning to IPO opening not just a sign that the banks accurately estimated something?

Sure they estimated something. But there's a ton of different things that can be estimated.

SpicyLemonZest• 6 days ago

All of the IPO banks have a public position that SpaceX is actually undervalued and should be at least $200. (Are they telling the truth? lol.)

marricks• 6 days ago

the share price returning to IPO opening not just a sign that the banks accurately estimated something

I mean who knows where it will end up by the end of the year. Meme-stock-hype train could continue or it could reasonably crash far further back down to earth.

make3• 5 days ago

Not if it's going to keep dropping, which I think is fair to assume as people wake up to the fundamentals after the hype is done (not financial advice)

tempfile• 6 days ago

Still 10x higher than any rational price.

Zigurd7• 6 days ago

And I had to scroll all the way down here to find a post that wasn't high octane copium.

glasffordd• 6 days ago

Typical IPO pattern. Hyped IPOs shoot up and then correct, some correct more than others. Traders take their profits. Nothing new here, just bigger headlines because it's a big name. The bigger the name, the bigger the hype.

xxs• 6 days ago

Not really, it got turbo charged to Nasdaq which involves some involuntary investments.

vladmk• 6 days ago

I’m really tempted to buy a chunk right now lol

blueone• 6 days ago

Me too, and not for any rational reason or because I value my money or my investing strategies, but simply because I have a high risk tolerance, and it seems like these days that’s all you need to make money.

No real skill, no real research. Just ride the hype train, shrug if you lose, and never gloat when you win. Simply take the profit, stfu, and buy a Porsche or some RAM.

panick21_4• 6 days ago

or some RAM.

Look at Mr. Billionaire right here.

marcusverus• 6 days ago

Do yourself a favor and DCA in from here. SpaceX was "only" valued at 210 Billion back in June 2024, around 11% of its current valuation. A return to that valuation would take it down to ~$16/share!

SpaceX is a phenomenal company. I've wanted to buy in since 2009. But the stock is the exact inverse of my ideal single-stock investment thesis--huge downside with severely limited short-to-mid-term upside, given the huge premium already being paid.

Maybe take a look at Rocket Lab :)

indoordin0saur4• 6 days ago

I'm thinking that over the course of the next 10-18 months the price should continue to come down as pre-IPO shareholders become unlocked and can sell their shares.

ChrisMarshallNY• 6 days ago

As reported in The Shovel: https://theshovel.com.au/2026/06/29/factory-that-makes-world...

mothballed4• 6 days ago

If the IPO can't find institutional buyers at the price and has to resort transferring the initial shares directly to the public, safe to assume they've hyped the public into being the bag holder. What SpaceX did is rare for a reason.

throwpoaster• 6 days ago

Could be a great buying opportunity depending on your theory of investment.

p-o• 6 days ago

This line of thinking could be applied to literally any company in the world, even to Spirit Airlines 5 minutes before it went out of business.

MinimalAction• 6 days ago

As a scientific adventure, SpaceX is a worthy company full of awesome people. But the management and VCs is another story, as usual. To price it at a market cap of $1.8T, somewhere double that of Walmart is insane.

incognition• 6 days ago

how much should two walmarts be worth?

port11• 5 days ago

One SpaceX, of course.

amazingamazing• 6 days ago

Looks to still be over a trillion market cap.

manoDev• 6 days ago

Mid-August there’s a shareholder unlock of 20%, we haven’t seen the dip yet.

asah• 6 days ago

only if other investors "catch" it...

natas• 6 days ago

shocking, who could have predicted that?

notjustanymike• 6 days ago

SpaceX blasting up and dropping right back where it started feels appropos.

MrDunham• 6 days ago

It landed back where it started.

Seems very appropos.

petesergeant• 6 days ago

closing at $135.27

ffs, wake me up when it's at least 10% below what it IPO'd for. The idiotic tulip mania that followed in the few days after it floated was noise, but as of today, it seems the IPO price was pretty much right. However, endless headlines about the price crashing etc.

From a fundamentals perspective, it's an insane price, obviously. But the narrative that it's all coming crashing down is obviously not correct (today).

ornornor2• 6 days ago

“Shocking nobody” I would add… This is an obvious Musk scam and anyone with financial knowledge called it as such ever since it’s been on the table. Why else lobby and change the NASDAQ listing rules for instance?

spiderfarmer• 6 days ago

It really showed which financial commentators should be ignored. Hearing some of them speak was just painful.

infecto20• 6 days ago

I don’t think scam is the right word. The valuation and bank price targets are absolutely insane. I myself could never invest at those multiples. I think they absolutely have governance problems but at the same time I have to admit he is a great financial engineer.

Investors who do have conviction here most likely see this as the platform vehicle for everything else coming through the pipeline. Again I could not buy into that but I think it’s a far cry from a scam.

colechristensen• 6 days ago

There's no room in the global economy to justify the kinds of numbers.

Like spacex isn't going to be the world's first 100 trillion dollar company because there isn't that much money. That's nearly as high as the global GDP.

Crazy growth rates are not possible.

epistasis4• 6 days ago

I'm unclear why you don't think it's a scam, because "he is a great financial engineer" seems awfully close to admitting that and then the "platform vehicle for everything else coming through the pipeline" seems to be the clincher that it is indeed a scam.

For example, he's talking about data centers in space as the "everything else coming through the pipeline" and space data centers are an obvious engineering boondoggle, but sound cool to people that don't know anything about data center design or the challenges of space engineering (ie heat rejection)

bobro3• 6 days ago

Can you spell out a bit more how these three thoughts live together consistently for you:

1) The price is insane

2) The price is a work of great financial engineering

3) The price isn’t a scam

jagged-chisel2• 6 days ago

I don’t think scam is the right word. The valuation and bank price targets are absolutely insane.

I was hoping you were headed to "...beyond scam" into serious fraud or something. Regardless how this is categorized, everyone (banks, stock market, the executive branch) is complicit, and I think SpaceX stock should have stayed off the public market.

0x3f• 6 days ago

I guess it depends on the framing: a scam perpetrated on whom? It's not a scam on active investors if you lock in a bump from guaranteed passive investors. The active investors will see gains from that bump. But on the passive investors? On wider society?

If you spot the regulator looking the other way and try to sneak one past, is that legitimate, or sketchy? What if you recently had the influence to make them look the other way or be under-resourced?

You could argue 'treason' is a better word than 'scam'.

avaer3• 6 days ago

I guess the difference between "scam" and "financial engineer" is whether it works.

If everyone loses their money it will be a scam. If people get rich he will be a financial engineer.

These aren't two different things. The winning side will make up reasons why they are right, and the losing side will make up excuses why they were wrong.

k4rli• 6 days ago

Almost all of their promises since start have just been corporate puffery and pure vaporware. Going to Mars, point-to-point Earth travel, Starship, reusable rockets...

Same with all his other companies.

insane_dreamer• 6 days ago

I have to admit he is a great financial engineer.

so was Madoff

vor_• 6 days ago

I must say, "great financial engineering" serves as an amazing spin on "scam."

fullshark• 6 days ago

And it worked. And whatever schemes he has in mind to have Space X merge with Tesla to increase market cap further will work too.

chasd00• 6 days ago

Not a scam IMO, I don’t think musk is that motivated by wealth but im sure plenty of the heavy hitter investors are. I’m sure he didn’t complain about the valuation however. I think SpaceX is a solid well run company (praise be to Gwen Shotwel) but $1T is a bit much. I’ll eventually buy in when things settle down and we have a few quarters of financial data to work with.

criley2• 6 days ago

"Not a scam IMO"
"I think SpaceX is a solid well run company"

This should be all the proof you need that it's a scam. Here's why:

The company isn't "SpaceX" it's "SpaceXAI", and nearly all of the valuation comes from the "AI" component, not the "SpaceX" component.

epistasis4• 6 days ago

What you describe is exactly a scam: he somehow convinced you that he's not motivated by wealth! That alone is clearly a scam, the idea that Musk is not motivated by huge amounts of wealth and high valuations is just implausible considering g his behavior at every single turn.

evilfred• 6 days ago

SpaceX makes its revenue from renting out GPUs

baxtr• 6 days ago

I warned people 2 months ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48368668

toomuchtodo2• 6 days ago

I was told I was giving poor advice explaining how to avoid exposure to the latest Musk grift. Unfortunate.

“It's easier to fool people than to convince them that they have been fooled.” —- Mark Twain

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48374430

(SpaceX shorts have made ~$4B in profits on paper so far, as of this comment)

ToValueFunfetti2• 6 days ago

This is shaped like more-or-less every IPO I've seen. I think you have to wait for more of a collapse to claim dispositive evidence of a scam (or widen your claim to 'almost all IPOs are scams').

trescenzi• 6 days ago

This is something you could empirically study. Looks like this NASDAQ study from a few years back has some numbers. At 3 months, that’s what’s in their chart, it’s still about 50/50. At 3 years it’s 29% with returns greater than 10% and 69% with returns greater than -10%.

https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/what-happens-to-ipos-over-th...

jmye• 6 days ago

(or widen your claim to 'almost all IPOs are scams')

In a world where retail basically has no access to true IPO pricing, I don't think this is untrue for the majority of investors.

Jamming SpaceX directly into a bunch of indexes just because Musk wanted it (and everyone is a coward or complicit) stunk of "scam" in a very different way, though.

oblio5• 6 days ago

SpaceX has a float of 5%. So only 5% of SpaceX shares have been released to the public. Slowly, starting in August, employees and investors will be able to sell their shares, about 45% more until December 2026 and another 45% until July 2027.

What do you think will happen to SpaceX share prices when roughly 18x the number of shares at IPO are released?

From a company that only made $18bn in sales last year and lost $5bn. For reference, Aramark, a company basically nobody has heard of made as much money and even turned a $0.5bn profit.

SpaceX shouldn't be worth more than $30 in 1 year's time.

Of course, irrationality can be an extremely strong force, so let's see.

tw04• 6 days ago

Really? Which other IPO involves a company acquiring a completely unrelated company just before IPO in order to bail the founder out of a bad investment?

Can you name even one example in the last 50 years?

therobots927• 6 days ago

Most IPOs don’t put up 5% of the float for sale. Usually it’s closer to 30-60%.

soulofmischief• 6 days ago

It's a scam because of the hype mind control and propaganda around it. Because Musk tried to force it into the NASDAQ and S&P 500 before the normal windows, attempting to bypass sensible regulations that protect investors.

ncallaway• 6 days ago

Many IPOs slide below their initial offering.

Very few IPOs changed the rules to allow themselves to be incuded in significant indexes far faster than the rules previously allowed, and then slipped below their initial offering.

Taronar• 6 days ago

This is incorrect, the difference is that most IPOs do not have ETFs buying their stocks, meaning you have a institutional investor forced to buy your stock and keep the musical chairs game going even if your stock has an inflated price., hes robbing ETF owners of their hard earned money

lorecore9• 6 days ago

The valuation based on fundamentals is a scam, you can just look at the numbers. This is unlike any other IPO.

melenaboija• 6 days ago

This is not shaped like any other IPO. Objectively, it’s the biggest IPO in history and was included in the Nasdaq unusually fast. More subjectively, a significant part of its value is tied to the vision and credibility of a single person. Which BTW happens to be the first trillionaire in the world if things go well.

dkenyser• 6 days ago

Yes, it's almost like that's why there _was_ a rule in place to prevent IPOs like this from being shoved down everyone's throats so quickly without further testing.

alsobrsp• 6 days ago

This is the main point. I bought Backblaze too early in its post IPO phase. It's a good company and I am a customer, but I am down $15k on the buy.

8note• 6 days ago

the scam here is knowing that the price will be lower, but forcing index funds to buy high

kmfrk• 6 days ago

It got particularly bad with SPACs in the last few years.

jjav3• 6 days ago

This is shaped like more-or-less every IPO I've seen.

Not even remotely. Many startups IPO with no profit (though not all), but there is nearly always a credible business plan and a semi-rational valuation.

None of this is the case for spcx. They claim their TAM is about the size of the entire GPD of the USA and that they'll soon have 1T/yr in profits. All based on... nothing. The numbers are wildly unrealistic by a multiple never before seen. Oh and full self driving will be here before end of this year, trust them.

JCW20013• 5 days ago

Oh yes, I tell you're a real market analyst. SpaceX is exactly like every IPO ever. Except actually it's unlike just about every IPO there has ever been for so many reasons: The tiny float, special treatment, the intense lockups, valuation at 100x its revenue. No IPO has ever been like this.

indoordin0saur4• 6 days ago

It's right at IPO price, which (thus far) means it was more or less priced correctly.

rob742• 6 days ago

Yes, it is an obvious scam, but as far as I understood, it was a scam that was guaranteed to succeed: SpaceX is listed on Nasdaq and added to the Nasdaq index after only two weeks thanks to the rules Nasdaq changed at SpaceX's behest, so all funds that track Nasdaq have to buy SpaceX shares, so the prices were going to explode automatically because they made sure there will not be enough shares available. What went wrong? Are SpaceX employees dumping their shares so fast that supply outstrips demand?

bartek_gdn• 6 days ago

Priced in before the event then?

robot_jesus• 6 days ago

There's a lot to unpack here, but a few thoughts. SpaceX wasn't added to the Nasdaq until two days ago, which is right around the time the stock was reaching it's current lows. Doesn't make sense to say that they prices exploded because of that.

Second, I don't know the details but it's extremely unlikely that most SpaceX folks have been able to sell any shares. Typically there's a 90–180 restricted window where pre-IPO holders are not allowed to sell.

The limited float could theoretically drive up, but as I noted, it wasn't added to the Nasdaq 100 until two days ago, so it's not something we can really attribute to that.

Btw, I loathe Elon Musk as a human, but am just clarifying some facts.

nxm• 6 days ago

So I presume you made a lot of money shorting the stock if you were so confident?

sethammons• 6 days ago

The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent

ryandamm• 6 days ago

“The world can remain irrational longer than you can remain liquid.”

stingraycharles• 6 days ago

Why would anyone want to risk any money going any way with these stocks?

Tesla isn’t behaving rationally, there is no way to tell whether SpaceX will behave rationally or not.

It seems like it’s becoming somewhat more rational, but all these stocks just seem to be incomprehensible to me.

ornornor2• 6 days ago

I can hold a strong opinion on this matter without risking any of my own money.

I own no Musk stock and never short anything.

I don’t think that affects the opinion I stated in any way.

eudamoniac• 6 days ago

Well I sure did. Not sure why you are writing this as a "gotcha". Buying puts is not some insane play. I gained about 85%.

m3kw9• 6 days ago

Some would still say Tesla is a scam.

randusername• 6 days ago

What's the point of an IPO? Show problematic institutional investors the door and replace them with disorganized public investors? Attract talent?

Seems like if the company is really doing great you'd want to retain ownership. Raise from bonds or something. Put simply, if it's valuable why would anyone sell it?

dhagz• 6 days ago

A lot of VCs had money locked up in SpaceX, like, portfolios going back a decade or more had some sort of investment in SpaceX. The IPO gave them an exit.

LightBug1• 6 days ago

It's ok. Let the Musk-riders enjoyed their ride ...

Elon bought them an imaginary horse ...

sleight42• 6 days ago

Doesn't need to be said but "Thank you for being the top comment." Shocking nobody, indeed.

simonpure• 6 days ago

I always wonder why not more companies are using more creative approaches like Google's Dutch auction to set their IPO price.

It seems direct listings gained some popularity but overall most companies seem to rely on the traditional underwriter model.

According to [0] -

22 companies went public on major exchanges using IPO auctions in the U.S. between 1999-2008, but there have been none since then, as of May 2025. Starting in 2018 when Spotify went public, there have been at least 20 companies that have gone public using a direct listing. With both IPO auctions and direct listings, underwriters do not have discretion to allocate shares to their preferred clients.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenIPO

DaedalusII• 6 days ago

thats been replaced with spac deals

also: can't pump the ipo and get exit liquidity for vc through a dutch auction

paxys• 6 days ago

When banks, pension funds and other institutional investors are fighting to outbid each other to get a slice of your IPO why would you care about finding an accurate value and being "fair"? Whether the price goes up and down post IPO isn't really the company's concern. They already have the cash.

jmyeet• 6 days ago

Google's process produced a price of IIRC $85/share and on first-day trading soared to >$100 so there was a lot of discussion at the time about how efficient that process was.

But really that's how all IPOs work, basically. You have one of more investment banks that underwrite the offering. They're basically guaranteeing to sell a certain number of shares to their clients at a given price. Those clients can be institutional investors, pension funds, high net worth individuals and so on. But there's a feedback loop here where clients might push back on a certain price.

IPOs love these sorts of investors because they tend to buy and not sell. If everyone sells the IPO will flop. Retail investors are far less "loyal".

The IPOing company also has levers where they can manipulate the price, most notably on the supply side ie by limiting or expanding the size of the float. SpaceX's float (as a percentage of the company) was actually really small.

What's unique about the SpaceX IPO was that it would immediately become one of the world's most valuable listed companies so there'd be a lot of induced demand from index funds. The underhanded (IMHO) aspect to all this was that the rules were deliberately changed so passive investors would be exposed almost immediately rather than first allowing some form of price discovery by the market. NASDAQ capitualted. S&P did not.

I guess the real manipulation here is the fiction that SpaceX is an AI company, which ultimately goes back to a series of bailouts for terrible decisions going back to the Twitter purchase. SpaceX's AI pitch was orbital data centers, which make no sense, and using their ill-gotten NVidia chip allocations to rent them to Google.

hylaride• 6 days ago

The Dutch auction wasn't all that smooth, with Google having to adjust prices at the last minute. Most results show that it didn't really produce all that much of a benefit over a traditional IPO, where (the issuing company) at least gets a guaranteed minimum amount of money to raise. Pretty much the only alternative is a direct listing for companies that want to go public, but don't need to raise money. (Well, there's also SPACs, but that's a different beast).

small_model2• 6 days ago

Anyone buying IPO for short term gain would have exited at initial spike, others (like me got in at allocation price) will be holding for a decade or two so this is noise, expected not sure why it posted here, do we post every tech stock intra day price move

fg137• 6 days ago

And I don't understand why a serious media outlet is covering this at all. The entire article could be irrelevant the next day.

Without any actual, meaningful news coming out of the company (important financial update, new product, bankruptcy etc), stock price moves are only meaningful to day traders, not anyone who is doing serious investing. LA Times is making themselves the same as CNBC or sources you find on Yahoo finance.

grosswait• 6 days ago

Because anti-Elon thinking is a thing that really seems to impact the judgement of some people and this kind of news really gets them to engage

kumarski• 6 days ago

The sheer scale of global fiber optic, 5G, and FWA deployments is rapid enough along with middle distillates (jet fuel) getting rekt.

Something like 100k flights cancelled. Upgrading the planes to have starlink is onerous, high idle/offline time, and capital intensive.

The total potential market for Starlink shrinks by at least a few hundred thousand people each week.

khalic• 6 days ago

Right on time for https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/07/how-hard-is-it-to-buil...

eole666• 6 days ago

Maybe this has to do with the technical unfeasibility of sending human to Mars and back to earth while keeping them alive ? Throwing billions at it won't make it happen magically.

two_handfuls• 6 days ago

It doesn't, because SPCX isn't a space company, it's an AI company with a space hobby. That's what the IPO paperwork says at least.

pfdietz• 6 days ago

I think SpaceX has a great future ahead of it.

I didn't buy a single share.

avaer3• 6 days ago

That's good! Because this stock has pretty much nothing to do with the reality of SpaceX or its future. It's a trillion dollar memecoin.

Seb-C• 6 days ago

Same here. It's such a shame because I always wanted to invest in SpaceX (even despite it's CEO), but now most of the money would go to AI stuff rather than space exploration, so I'm out.

petilon• 6 days ago

SpaceX, despite its name is an AI company, supposedly. Its S-1 states that the company estimates its total addressable market (TAM) at $28.5 trillion, of which $26.5 trillion, or 92.98%, is expected to come from AI.

SpaceX is an AI company without a frontier model. Until Jan 2026 SpaceX was an aerospace company. Then xAI was merged into SpaceX on January 30, 2026, so SpaceX became an AI company less than 6 months ago.

Octoth0rpe2• 6 days ago

SpaceX is an AI company without a frontier model.

Unless they manage to build such a model, then their plan looks like they intend to be an AI _infrastructure_ company. Which is probably viable and healthy business! One with lots of competition and low margins that is completely misaligned with their current valuation.

aoshifo• 6 days ago

It might be a viable business model, but does not warrant anywhere near these valuations.

indoordin0saur4• 6 days ago

All these bans on building data centers on Earth are starting to make this wild proposition seem a little more rational.

samothrace• 6 days ago

Isn't it a little absurd to be guessing what the business model might be or should be for the company with the largest ever IPO, which got a free pass on (lack of) profitability? It's a little late.

mullingitover• 6 days ago

AI company, supposedly

Mainly it’s a REIT that bought a bunch of hardware which is now depreciating like fresh lettuce. They don’t even have a way to use it productively for AI purposes themselves and are instead renting it to competitors, who are using it to lap them.

tclancy• 6 days ago

now depreciating like fresh lettuce

Musk for Prime Minister is what I am hearing here.

tencentshill• 6 days ago

The SpaceX subsidiary SpaceXAI (formerly xAI) is X (Formerly Twitter) and xAI. Things move fast in the trillion dollar valuation world.

defmetrix2• 6 days ago

Ive never understood why so many people seem to cheer for Elon's companies to fail.

Retr0id• 6 days ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schadenfreude#Psychological_ca...

thinkingtoilet• 6 days ago

Because he's a psychopath who is actively making the world worse. Anyone who stands on stage with a chain saw and cuts US AID with a smile on his face is a truly horrible person. Anyone who hoards a trillion dollars while others starve is a truly horrible person. Did you root for the Empire in Star Wars? I hope nothing but the worst for him so maybe someone with a conscious and a soul replaces him.

d4ng• 6 days ago

It has helped me to live with the model that the probability of there being any sort of objective morality or ethics is close to zero, and that a hierarchy of influence within any given context is generally unavoidable. Once you accept this model, you spend less time moralising and angering yourself over perceived wrongs, and can now spend more time on figuring out how to live a happier life despite the fact that there are no set rules.

simiones• 6 days ago

People generally hate to see scams stealing money from naive marks. Both SpaceX and Tesla are obvious scams at anything close to their current valuations (despite having real, functional businesses in there! ), that Elon keeps pumping up with ever more ridiculous claims (50 million humanoid robots by 2026/7! Tesla Roadster out by 2024, pre-order now! Starship point-to-point for business travel by 2030! Datacenters in space!).

panick21_4• 6 days ago

I was a fan of early Elon. He had many problems but he was overall good.

Then he turned full ultra right wing nationalist who engaged in science denial. Supported a president that is unquestionably racists and unquestionably fascists. And he made this clear by doing some Nazi salutes on top of that.

Then he used that influence to sell a completely false idiotic story that cuts to discretionary spending could 'fix' the budget deficit, like a complete idiot who had never watched 2 youtube videos about the US budget. Then used to slash and burn many beneficial programs while having no impact on the deficit what so ever.

He was supposed to be science and engineering progress driven, but then allied himself with ultra-right wing anti-scientific fascists who try to dismantle the whole education system in favor of at best best creationism or more likely nothing at all.

Not sure why its hard to understand. The only people who don't understand are ultra-right wing facists who don't understand why other people don't want to support ultra-right wing facists.

Does that explanation help?

defmetrix2• 6 days ago

I hear what you are saying. There are many CEOs and companies that I also dont like. But I dont spend everyday checking their stock price and cheering for them to fail like they are my rival sports team. I just dont understand why many people are so glued to watching his companies, rooting for failure, and running to post on the internet as soon as something bad happens. I cant think of a similar situation.

jitl• 6 days ago

noooo my stonks

alexlesuper• 6 days ago

This was completely predictable. Anyone with a brain looking at this stock would have shorted it.

abtinf• 6 days ago

I’m way out of my depth in suggesting this idea, so forgive me if I’m committing a conceptual “divide by zero” and it’s not even wrong:

It seems like the SpaceX IPO really breaks the traditional notion of market cap.

Market cap has an unstated assumption that most of a company’s stock could, in theory, be traded unencumbered. Thus shares * price gives a very rough view of the value of the company. Everyone understands that this valuation has problems: it attributes the last marginal trade to the entire stock, and doesn’t account for large purchases/sales. But it’s useful nonetheless.

But with SpaxeX, only a tiny fraction of those shares are even theoretically tradeable, so it seems bizarre to calculate valuation using price * shares. I think this is the source of discomfort around the $2T market cap.

It seems like, similar to how there are long and short term liabilities, there should be long and short term market caps.

“Short term market cap” would be price * “number of shares that could theoretically be available for trade within the next year”, from all sources (including vesting employee options, expiring lockups, etc).

“Long term market cap” would be price * total authorized shares.

So SpaceX’s long term market cap would remain at $2T and its short term market cap would be, say, 5% of that (about $100B).

rsynnott• 6 days ago

Nah, it's fairly common for only a relatively small part of a company to be tradeable.

Beijinger4• 6 days ago

No, shares are shares. Public or not.

jerf• 6 days ago

Market cap has been that sort of fiction from the beginning. It's never been a terribly useful number. There's really no fixing it because the only way to "truly" value a company is to sell it, for real, on the open market. Anything else is just a guess. More or less educated, but a guess. SpaceX isn't creating this problem or making it particularly worse.

pedrocr• 6 days ago

What you are describing is what's called free float market cap and is generally what market indices use to weigh stocks. That way you're only trying to replicate the market of stocks that are actually available to trade. There's nothing new about SpaceX in that respect, plenty of companies have float much lower than their total.

dboreham• 6 days ago

Different classes of shares are possible, as are other time-varying schemes such as warrants. But that's not what Musk did. The shares all have the same class.

genericresponse• 6 days ago

You're not wrong, but the weakness you point out isn't a new concept.

Market cap is, at best, a rough valuation of the company. It has many confounding variables of which liquidity can be one of them. That's part of why investment analysts put out price targets for companies. The counterpoint is that market price is driven by what people are actually paying.

One of the major challenges with valuation is settling on a methodology overall. There are many ways, appropriate and not, to value a company. Many will have different estimates for value. There are also factors, like control premium, that start to become relevant when you try to completely acquire a company.

One of the benefits of an open and liquid market is that future availability of locked shares can be priced in early. We all get the benefit of consensus information.

cmiles8• 6 days ago

There’s still really nothing keeping it at even these lower levels except pure hype. By the fundamentals typically applied to aggressive growth companies a “sane” price is closer to $40-60 and even that would be very aggressive considering the company’s financials.

If the company doesn’t quickly show a financial picture that matches the sky high pro formas then even anything close to those levels will become extremely hard to justify.

The bond markets have already turned very negative on SpaceX with extreme red flags developing there.

segmondy• 6 days ago

something something about fools and their money are easily parted.

paulvnickerson• 6 days ago

I think people around here just dislike Elon Musk for his politics and are rooting for his stuff to fail at every turn.

Beijinger4• 6 days ago

SpaceX: The Biggest Money Loser in IPO History

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IHD8BDFYyGI

shark1• 6 days ago

It's typical to happen after IPOs. The same happened to: IBM, Meta, Google, Nvidia, Apple, and many others...

PS: I am not saying SpaceX is a good investment.

hunmernop• 6 days ago

Buy low sell high

Balgair• 6 days ago

Honest question here: What does this mean for Anthropic's OPenAI's rumored IPOs?

Zigurd7• 6 days ago

Over in the past three months I've posted two polls on HN asking if one or both of the OpenAI and SpaceX IPO's would fail, with the definition of failure being dropping below IPO price by the end of the year, or the IPO failing altogether. The votes were against both IPOs succeeding. Albeit with a small sample, the results indicated skepticism early on.

Anthropic could go either way. My guess is that if the financials aren't Enron scale flaming garbage, they'll be fine.

panick21_4• 6 days ago

Still far to high. I love SpaceX as in 'space', they were a great company, doing things nobody else could. Now its a dumb AI company that hands over cash to micron, nvidia and friends who literally print money, while financing that with delusional promises.

Many people can soon sell their SpaceX stock, I don't think the S&P will safe them later.

sharts• 6 days ago

“The shares regained some ground later in the day, closing at $135.27.”

ChrisArchitect• 6 days ago

SpaceX bond worth 10% less than issue price – heading for junk bond status

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48920181

tester756• 6 days ago

Obvious mess. I bought it on IPO and sold 1-2 hours later with some gain

Lerc• 6 days ago

It surprises me that this seems so consequential to observers. According to a quick search, around 40% of IPOs are below their IPO price at their one year anniversary.

I'm not invested in this myself, figuratively or literally.

I guess for any stock to rise, there have to be people thinking it will be worth more in the future.

I presume there is a way to mathematically determine how atypical the SoaceX stock is behaving. Does anyone have a reference to how this would normally be done?

ratelimitsteve• 6 days ago

This all feels like it was designed to artificially inject cash into xAI despite the average person being strongly against it. First they merge that company with SpaceX despite having very little in common in either of their infrastructure or goals, then they change the rules to get the stock out to the general public as quickly as possible on the promise that obviously it's going to explode in value and make everyone very rich to justify that decision, then once they have investor cash in-hand the stock price slips. I think they just tried to leverage SpaceX's relatively popular, positive image into investments into xAI by more or less giving up on SpaceX being anything but a wrapper around xAI.

tim-tday• 6 days ago

Correction, worst day so far.

iamoseauditor• 4 days ago

I'm lost, what?

SpaceX stock erases all its gains and slides below IPO price in intraday trading

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