SpaceX stock falls below $135 IPO price

SpaceX’s shares fell below $135 on Wednesday afternoon, dropping to beneath $133 per share — below the price that CEO Elon Musk’s company set for its June 12 initial public offering (IPO), which raked in nearly $86 billion. The dip came about a month after the company went public.

The stock had initially climbed to more than $200 in the days after the IPO, briefly giving SpaceX a valuation that rivaled tech giants like Amazon and Microsoft. It has lost value most weeks since. Some of that volatility is attributable to the fact that just 4% of the company’s total shares are trading on the Nasdaq — a small “float,” the portion of a company’s shares free to trade on the open market, which tends to amplify price swings.

The market’s reaction to SpaceX’s stock is being watched as a bellwether for other large tech companies weighing public listings, including Anthropic and OpenAI, both of which have filed confidentially for an IPO. Neither company has set a date to go public, but investors and founders elsewhere are treating SpaceX’s post-IPO trading as an early signal of how those offerings might be received.

SpaceX faces its own test of that confidence on Thursday, when it will test launch its Starship rocket for the first time since the IPO. Starship is still in development, which means it is prone to failures, the result of SpaceX’s “fly, fail, fix” approach to iteration. This will be the first flight since Starship experienced a booster failure in May. SpaceX does not plan to try to recover the booster or upper stage on this flight; instead, both are set to simulate a landing in the Gulf of Mexico, meaning the vehicle is expected to end in an explosion regardless of how the flight plan proceeds.

Why it matters

SpaceX’s stock performance is being closely watched as a gauge of investor appetite for Musk’s ambitious promises for the company, and as a signal for how confidential IPOs from AI companies like Anthropic and OpenAI might be received once they go public.