As many investors had hoped, SpaceX successfully completed its record IPO on Friday.
The shares of the Tesla boss’s space, satellite and AI company Elon Musk started trading on the US technology exchange Nasdaq at $150.
The price was a good 11 percent above the issue price of $135, which gave Musk income of $75 billion – and gave the already richest person in the world the status of the first trillionaire. In the largest IPO in history, the Saudi Arabian oil company Aramco raised a good $29 billion in 2019.
Since Musk only listed a five percent stake in SpaceX, the company’s total valuation at launch was $1.77 trillion. This meant that the company was immediately worth more than the Facebook group Meta, which currently has $1.43 trillion on the scale. SpaceX also clearly left the electric car manufacturer Tesla behind.
And that wasn’t the end of the line yet. After the shares rose to $176.52, they closed at $160.95, which means a gain of a good 19 percent. The company’s valuation climbed to almost $2.1 trillion. This means that statements from pre-market trading in derivatives that had attributed a valuation of over $2 trillion to SpaceX came true. SpaceX moved into the spheres of the most valuable US companies on its first day of trading. In after-hours trading, the shares rose another 3.66 percent to $166.84.
The undisputed top dog is still the AI chip giant NVIDIA with almost 5 trillion dollars, followed by Google parent company Alphabet and the tech giant Apple with values above the 4 trillion mark. The software company Microsoft follows at some distance with a value of 2.9 trillion dollars, as – similar to Apple – the hype surrounding artificial intelligence (AI) cost it its previous top position, among other things. SpaceX is already closing in on the online retailer and technology giant Amazon, which currently has almost $2.6 trillion.
Before SpaceX began trading, market observer Stephen Innes emphasized that a market valuation of over $2 trillion at the close of the first day of trading would provide a meaningful valuation template for the next mega IPOs in the AI sector. The ChatGPT inventor OpenAI and its rival Anthropic are in the starting blocks.
Despite all the enthusiasm for the SpaceX IPO, there were also skeptical voices about whether a company that has not yet made profits deserves such a high valuation. “When it comes to fundamentals, investors are ahead of their time,” said Amanda Lyons, head of research at hedge fund Energy Group Capital. A valuation of the sum of the company’s individual parts would be around $600 billion, which would be around a third of its current value. But betting against the high valuations of Elon Musk’s companies was a losing proposition for a decade, the expert admitted.
Long-time Musk supporters came to a much more positive verdict anyway. This is what Shaun Maguire – partner at the venture capital investment company thinks Sequoia Capitalwhich led the company’s investments in Musk’s companies – the valuation standard is justified. “SpaceX’s IPO signals the transition from a software-dominated to a hardware-dominated world,” he emphasized.
SpaceX plays a key role in the US space program with its rockets. The company also operates the Starlink satellite internet service, which is by far the biggest moneymaker. Musk also brought his AI company xAI and the online platform X into SpaceX. This means investors could benefit from several megatrends at once.
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NEW YORK (dpa-AFX)
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