The SpaceX IPO made history. Is the excitement still there?

SpaceX investors have swung from celebration to apparent concern in its first month as a publicly traded company.

When shares in the firm, co-founded and led by Elon Musk, first became available for individuals to buy on the public stock market on 12 June, there was an investor frenzy.

Although the company had decided to price its shares at $135 each, the price immediately shot up to $150 that first day, climbing to $176, before closing at $160.95.

It solidified SpaceX as the largest initial public offering (IPO) of all time.

The following week, its shares went up even further, hitting an intraday high of $225, meaning it had surpassed Amazon and Microsoft in total market value.

“With Elon Musk, any company he touches gets people excited,” Keith Snyder, analyst at investment research firm CFRA, said. “But this 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 Neosteller, which facilitates individual investors putting money into private companies, agreed that the excitement around the IPO was very much around artificial intelligence (AI).

“Everyone saw SpaceX as an AI story,” he said.

SpaceX earlier this year acquired Musk’s AI start-up xAI, recently renamed SpaceXAI, external and best known for the controversial chatbot Grok, and also started leasing data centre capacity to other tech companies.