SpaceX drops to $135 to go public ahead of Starship launch

SpaceX shares fell to just over $135 on Wednesday, the price chosen by CEO Elon Musk and his company ahead of its June 12 initial public offering that raised nearly $86 billion.

The company’s stock spent most of the day below its IPO price, at one point dipping below $133 a share, before trading back to close at $135.27.

Wednesday’s decline followed a steady decline in the month since the company went public. SpaceX initially saw its stock price rise to more than $200 in the days after it went public, briefly giving it a valuation that rivaled tech giants like Amazon and Microsoft. Its shares have essentially lost value every week since reaching that high point.

Some of the volatility is due to the fact that only 4% of the company’s total shares are traded on the NASDAQ. This small “float,” as it is known, combined with an enormous amount of ongoing interest in the company, created extreme volatility during the first month of trading.

Markets also appear to be waking up to CEO Elon Musk’s grand vision for the company, part of a broader downturn in technology stocks over the past month. Not only did SpaceX shares decline, but… Bonds sold by the company In the wake of the IPO they suffer.

SpaceX’s prolonged downturn could have broader implications because the company’s stock price is a sign of how investors view other (literal) promises Musk has made about what his company can deliver. SpaceX’s IPO has also set the table for other big tech companies like Anthropic and OpenAI to go public. Both companies have secretly applied for an IPO. Although an IPO date has not been set, SpaceX shares are being closely watched to gauge the success of these IPOs.

SpaceX is about to face another early test of the durability of its stock price. On Thursday, the company will test-fire a Starship rocket for the first time since the IPO. Starship is still very much under development, which means it’s vulnerable to failure — a result of SpaceX’s “fly, fail, fix” approach.

This will be Starship’s first flight since it suffered a booster failure in May. Again, the company has no plans to attempt to recover the spacecraft’s booster or upper stage from this flight, instead opting to have them simulate a landing in the Gulf of Mexico. This means that both parts of the overall Starship missile system will end up exploding no matter what, even if they don’t encounter any problems during the flight plan.

This story has been updated to include the closing price.