SpaceX slips below its $135 IPO price ahead of Starship launch

Shares of SpaceX fell below $135, the price CEO Elon Musk and his company chose ahead of its blockbuster June 12 initial public offering that raised nearly $86 billion.

After falling below that price to below $133 per share on Wednesday afternoon, the stock traded back down to the $135 price, occasionally hovering above it.

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

Some of the volatility is due to the fact that only 4% of the company’s total shares trade on the Nasdaq. That little “float,” as it’s known, combined with a huge amount of constant attention on the company, has caused wild swings in its first month of trading.

Markets also appear to be sobering over CEO Elon Musk’s grand vision for the company, part of a broader deflation in tech stocks over the past month. Not only are SpaceX shares down, but… bonds that the company sold also suffer in the aftermath of the IPO.

A prolonged downturn for SpaceX could have broader implications, as the company’s stock price is a sign of how investors view the (literal) otherworldly promises Musk has made about what his company can achieve. SpaceX’s IPO also paved the way for the IPOs of other major tech companies such as Anthropic and OpenAI. Both companies have confidentially filed for an IPO. While neither has set a date for going public, SpaceX’s stock is being closely watched to gauge how successful these IPOs could be.

SpaceX is about to face another early test of the sustainability of its stock price. On Thursday, the company will test launch its Starship rocket for the first time since its initial public offering. Starship is still very much in development, which means it is prone to failure – the result of SpaceX’s ‘fly, fail, fix’ approach.

This will be the first Starship flight since a booster failure occurred in May. And again, the company has no plans to attempt to retrieve the Starship booster or upper stage on this flight, opting instead to have them simulate a landing in the Gulf of Mexico. That means both parts of the overall Starship rocket system will end in an explosion anyway, even if they encounter no problems during the flight plan.