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SpaceX stock erases all its gains and slides below IPO price in intraday trading
- throw0101d 3mo agoIPOs are generally not a good investment, at least not relative to average market return: > However, a year later, we see that the majority of companies are either outperforming or underperforming the market by more than 10%. We also see that more companies are underperforming than beating the index (the red bars stretch below the 50% line). > That seems to indicate that for some companies, the initial IPO enthusiasm wanes or expected earnings are not met, and investors reprice the IPO to reflect the actual, slower growth of the company. > Three years after their IPO, we calculate that almost two-thirds of IPOs are underperforming the market, with most (64%) more than 10% behind the market’s returns. * https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/what-happens-to-ipos-over-the-long-run-2021-04-15 https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/what-happens-to-ipos-over-th... > 56% of IPOs bought at the offer price lost money after 3 years. That number rises to 57% after five years. The numbers are higher when bought at the first day closing price: 60% lost money after 3 and 5 years. Worse than a coin flip. > Only 19% of IPOs doubled or more after three years and 22% after 5 years when bought at the offering price. The numbers were worse when bought at the closing price. > Of course, the lottery-like returns were possible, but it amounted to about 0.4% of all IPOs after 3 years and 1% after five years. * https://novelinvestor.com/the-hype-and-hot-air-around-ipos/ https://novelinvestor.com/the-hype-and-hot-air-around-ipos/ Interview with a researcher that has looked at IPOs over the last few decades: > We’ve previously compared IPOs to lotteries that are prone to inflated valuations and low returns. Today we welcome “Mr. IPO,” Professor Jay Ritter onto the show for a deeper dive into IPO performance, for his insights into SPACs, and to hear his research into why economic growth doesn’t correlate with stock returns. Early in the episode, Jay unpacks how long-term IPO returns perform against first-day trading. While exploring the role that venture capital plays in tech IPOs, Jay talks about why negative earnings don’t affect tech IPOs in the short-term before sharing how skewness factors tend to impact young companies. Reflecting on how IPOs are usually underpriced, Jay discusses how the interests of companies are not aligned with the interests of IPO underwriters. After looking into IPO allocation, Jay compares the 2020 ‘hot IPO market’ with the internet bubble of the late 90s. Later, we ask Jay about what special-purpose acquisition companies (SPACs) are and why they’ve exploded in recent years. His answers highlight their investing benefits, risks, and why SPACs might be a better option for companies than IPOs. We examine how SPACs have historically performed and then jump into our next topic; why economic growth isn’t a good indicator that a country is worth investing in. He touches on why returns don’t correlate with economic growth, the place of capital gains and dividend yields when investing abroad, and how innovations in an industry can lead to higher stock returns. We wrap up our conversation by asking Jay for his take on whether the stock market is efficient before hearing how he defines success in his life. Tune in to hear our incredible and informative talk with Jay Ritter. * https://rationalreminder.ca/podcast/139 https://rationalreminder.ca/podcast/139 Picking individual winning stocks can be hard: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Random_Walk_Down_Wall_Street https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Random_Walk_Down_Wall_Street
- intrasight 3mo agoMany IPO's have the same trajectory that SpaceX did - first going up steeply and then dropping steeply. So there's certainly money to be made if you get the timing right but that is always the challenge.
- throw0101d 3mo agoWorth considering that "trading" and "investing" are different words. :)
- intrasight 3mo agoYes. And you can do both against the same equity at the same time. SpaceX is a good candidate for this due to short-term volatility and long-term strength.
- paoliniluis 3mo agoThe IPO was meant for the VCs to cash out as all fundamentals were completely irrational, but seems like no one cares about cash flow and profitability anymore during QE times. Dumb money will keep being dumb I guess
- vv_ 3mo agoIf no one cared about cash flow and profitability wouldn't SpaceX stock go up instead of down?
- mothballed 3mo agoPeople cared after the IPO but initially in far less informed circles I constantly heard from lower sophisticated investors bragging about how they'd been allocated X shares like they were Pokemon trading cards they managed to snag. They weren't very sensitive to the price, only to brag to their friends they had snagged them. After the shiny wore off and no one cared about how cool they were, they sold them.
- infecto 3mo agoThat is to be expected with any high profile IPO.
- mothballed 3mo agoNo this was anomalous for an IPO. People were limited to something like 10 shares that they had to pre-order like they were special order trading cards with an order cap as direct recipients of the initial shares. Usually the public starts buying IPOs in open market operations on the secondary market, which removes some of the shiny and "limited" factor.
- infecto 3mo agoI don’t think the allocation process changes the underlying point. The mechanics may have been unusual, but highly anticipated IPOs almost always attract buyers motivated by participation as much as valuation. Whether they got 10 shares through a special allocation or bought on the open market, there is usually a cohort that wants to say “I got in on the IPO.” Once the novelty fades, some of that demand naturally disappears. I’m not convinced that’s unique enough to call it anomalous. Edit: why would this get flagged lol?
- pfisherman 3mo agoMy understanding is that an ideally priced IPO should not move much from the opening price in the near term. If it pops it means they left money on the table. If it drops, then I am not sure what the implication is exactly? Now I think SpaceX is massively overhyped, but is the share price returning to IPO opening not just a sign that the banks accurately estimated something?
- ubermonkey 3mo ago>If it drops, then I am not sure what the implication is exactly? Surely you understand it's inverse of an IPO that jumps after intro, right? SpaceX is not seen by investors as worth its price. This is because it is not.
- lapcat 3mo ago> an ideally priced IPO Ideally priced from the perspective of pre-IPO investors. This seems like an argument for outside investors not to buy IPO stock.
- budsniffer952 3mo agoThere is no should or should not. Look at the financials and the price, and you as an individual get to determine if it's worth buying (or selling).
- RIMR 3mo agoWhat do you mean by this? The person you responded to never used the words "should" or "should not", and then you basically repeated what they said using more neutral words... What is so controversial about saying that SpaceX seems overpriced?
- yrjrjjrjjtjjr 3mo agoHis point is that sellers can do whatever suits their interests best, they don't have a duty to pick a fair price. And that it's on the buyer to decide whether to accept it or reject the price.
- tempfile 3mo agoStill 10x higher than any rational price.
- Zigurd 3mo agoAnd I had to scroll all the way down here to find a post that wasn't high octane copium.
- glasffordd 3mo agoTypical IPO pattern. Hyped IPOs shoot up and then correct, some correct more than others. Traders take their profits. Nothing new here, just bigger headlines because it's a big name. The bigger the name, the bigger the hype.
- xxs 3mo agoNot really, it got turbo charged to Nasdaq which involves some involuntary investments.
- vladmk 3mo agoI’m really tempted to buy a chunk right now lol
- blueone 3mo agoMe too, and not for any rational reason or because I value my money or my investing strategies, but simply because I have a high risk tolerance, and it seems like these days that’s all you need to make money. No real skill, no real research. Just ride the hype train, shrug if you lose, and never gloat when you win. Simply take the profit, stfu, and buy a Porsche or some RAM.
- marcusverus 3mo agoDo yourself a favor and DCA in from here. SpaceX was "only" valued at 210 Billion back in June 2024, around 11% of its current valuation. A return to that valuation would take it down to ~$16/share! SpaceX is a phenomenal company. I've wanted to buy in since 2009. But the stock is the exact inverse of my ideal single-stock investment thesis--huge downside with severely limited short-to-mid-term upside, given the huge premium already being paid. Maybe take a look at Rocket Lab :)
- indoordin0saur 3mo agoI'm thinking that over the course of the next 10-18 months the price should continue to come down as pre-IPO shareholders become unlocked and can sell their shares.
- ChrisMarshallNY 3mo agoAs reported in The Shovel: https://theshovel.com.au/2026/06/29/factory-that-makes-worlds-smallest-violins-unable-to-meet-demand-after-elon-musk-loses-trillionaire-status/ https://theshovel.com.au/2026/06/29/factory-that-makes-world...
- mothballed 3mo agoIf the IPO can't find institutional buyers at the price and has to resort transferring the initial shares directly to the public, safe to assume they've hyped the public into being the bag holder. What SpaceX did is rare for a reason.
- throwpoaster 3mo agoCould be a great buying opportunity depending on your theory of investment.
- p-o 3mo agoThis line of thinking could be applied to literally any company in the world, even to Spirit Airlines 5 minutes before it went out of business.
- MinimalAction 3mo agoAs a scientific adventure, SpaceX is a worthy company full of awesome people. But the management and VCs is another story, as usual. To price it at a market cap of $1.8T, somewhere double that of Walmart is insane.
- incognition 3mo agohow much should two walmarts be worth?
- port11 3mo agoOne SpaceX, of course.
- amazingamazing 3mo agoLooks to still be over a trillion market cap.
- manoDev 3mo agoMid-August there’s a shareholder unlock of 20%, we haven’t seen the dip yet.
- asah 3mo agoonly if other investors "catch" it...
- natas 3mo agoshocking, who could have predicted that?
- notjustanymike 3mo agoSpaceX blasting up and dropping right back where it started feels appropos.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- MrDunham 3mo agoIt landed back where it started. Seems very appropos.
- petesergeant 3mo ago> closing at $135.27 ffs, wake me up when it's at least 10% below what it IPO'd for. The idiotic tulip mania that followed in the few days after it floated was noise, but as of today, it seems the IPO price was pretty much right. However, endless headlines about the price crashing etc. From a fundamentals perspective, it's an insane price, obviously. But the narrative that it's all coming crashing down is obviously not correct (today).
- ornornor 3mo ago“Shocking nobody” I would add… This is an obvious Musk scam and anyone with financial knowledge called it as such ever since it’s been on the table. Why else lobby and change the NASDAQ listing rules for instance?
- spiderfarmer 3mo agoIt really showed which financial commentators should be ignored. Hearing some of them speak was just painful.
- fullshark 3mo agoAnd it worked. And whatever schemes he has in mind to have Space X merge with Tesla to increase market cap further will work too.
- jmye 3mo ago[dead]
- infecto 3mo agoI don’t think scam is the right word. The valuation and bank price targets are absolutely insane. I myself could never invest at those multiples. I think they absolutely have governance problems but at the same time I have to admit he is a great financial engineer. Investors who do have conviction here most likely see this as the platform vehicle for everything else coming through the pipeline. Again I could not buy into that but I think it’s a far cry from a scam.
- colechristensen 3mo agoThere's no room in the global economy to justify the kinds of numbers. Like spacex isn't going to be the world's first 100 trillion dollar company because there isn't that much money. That's nearly as high as the global GDP. Crazy growth rates are not possible.
- 3mo ago
- simonpure 3mo agoI always wonder why not more companies are using more creative approaches like Google's Dutch auction to set their IPO price. It seems direct listings gained some popularity but overall most companies seem to rely on the traditional underwriter model. According to [0] - > 22 companies went public on major exchanges using IPO auctions in the U.S. between 1999-2008, but there have been none since then, as of May 2025. Starting in 2018 when Spotify went public, there have been at least 20 companies that have gone public using a direct listing. With both IPO auctions and direct listings, underwriters do not have discretion to allocate shares to their preferred clients. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenIPO https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenIPO
- DaedalusII 3mo agothats been replaced with spac deals also: can't pump the ipo and get exit liquidity for vc through a dutch auction
- paxys 3mo agoWhen banks, pension funds and other institutional investors are fighting to outbid each other to get a slice of your IPO why would you care about finding an accurate value and being "fair"? Whether the price goes up and down post IPO isn't really the company's concern. They already have the cash.
- jmyeet 3mo agoGoogle's process produced a price of IIRC $85/share and on first-day trading soared to >$100 so there was a lot of discussion at the time about how efficient that process was. But really that's how all IPOs work, basically. You have one of more investment banks that underwrite the offering. They're basically guaranteeing to sell a certain number of shares to their clients at a given price. Those clients can be institutional investors, pension funds, high net worth individuals and so on. But there's a feedback loop here where clients might push back on a certain price. IPOs love these sorts of investors because they tend to buy and not sell. If everyone sells the IPO will flop. Retail investors are far less "loyal". The IPOing company also has levers where they can manipulate the price, most notably on the supply side ie by limiting or expanding the size of the float. SpaceX's float (as a percentage of the company) was actually really small. What's unique about the SpaceX IPO was that it would immediately become one of the world's most valuable listed companies so there'd be a lot of induced demand from index funds. The underhanded (IMHO) aspect to all this was that the rules were deliberately changed so passive investors would be exposed almost immediately rather than first allowing some form of price discovery by the market. NASDAQ capitualted. S&P did not. I guess the real manipulation here is the fiction that SpaceX is an AI company, which ultimately goes back to a series of bailouts for terrible decisions going back to the Twitter purchase. SpaceX's AI pitch was orbital data centers, which make no sense, and using their ill-gotten NVidia chip allocations to rent them to Google.
- small_model 3mo agoAnyone buying IPO for short term gain would have exited at initial spike, others (like me got in at allocation price) will be holding for a decade or two so this is noise, expected not sure why it posted here, do we post every tech stock intra day price move
- fg137 3mo agoAnd I don't understand why a serious media outlet is covering this at all. The entire article could be irrelevant the next day. Without any actual, meaningful news coming out of the company (important financial update, new product, bankruptcy etc), stock price moves are only meaningful to day traders, not anyone who is doing serious investing. LA Times is making themselves the same as CNBC or sources you find on Yahoo finance.
- grosswait 3mo agoBecause anti-Elon thinking is a thing that really seems to impact the judgement of some people and this kind of news really gets them to engage
- small_model 3mo agoBingo, hacker news has this tendency hence this is on the front page.
- root_axis 3mo agoThe "anti-Elon thinking" comes from the things Elon says and does.
- kumarski 3mo agoThe sheer scale of global fiber optic, 5G, and FWA deployments is rapid enough along with middle distillates (jet fuel) getting rekt. Something like 100k flights cancelled. Upgrading the planes to have starlink is onerous, high idle/offline time, and capital intensive. The total potential market for Starlink shrinks by at least a few hundred thousand people each week.
- khalic 3mo agoRight on time for https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/07/how-hard-is-it-to-build-orbital-data-centers-actually/ https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/07/how-hard-is-it-to-buil...
- xbas 3mo ago[dead]
- eole666 3mo agoMaybe this has to do with the technical unfeasibility of sending human to Mars and back to earth while keeping them alive ? Throwing billions at it won't make it happen magically.
- two_handfuls 3mo agoIt doesn't, because SPCX isn't a space company, it's an AI company with a space hobby. That's what the IPO paperwork says at least.
- pfdietz 3mo agoI think SpaceX has a great future ahead of it. I didn't buy a single share.
- avaer 3mo agoThat's good! Because this stock has pretty much nothing to do with the reality of SpaceX or its future. It's a trillion dollar memecoin.
- Seb-C 3mo agoSame here. It's such a shame because I always wanted to invest in SpaceX (even despite it's CEO), but now most of the money would go to AI stuff rather than space exploration, so I'm out.
- d3rockk 3mo ago[dead]
- petilon 3mo agoSpaceX, despite its name is an AI company, supposedly. Its S-1 states that the company estimates its total addressable market (TAM) at $28.5 trillion, of which $26.5 trillion, or 92.98%, is expected to come from AI. SpaceX is an AI company without a frontier model. Until Jan 2026 SpaceX was an aerospace company. Then xAI was merged into SpaceX on January 30, 2026, so SpaceX became an AI company less than 6 months ago.
- Octoth0rpe 3mo ago> SpaceX is an AI company without a frontier model. Unless they manage to build such a model, then their plan looks like they intend to be an AI _infrastructure_ company. Which is probably viable and healthy business! One with lots of competition and low margins that is completely misaligned with their current valuation.
- aoshifo 3mo agoIt might be a viable business model, but does not warrant anywhere near these valuations.
- burnerRhodov3 3mo agospending $22b to make $30B a year seems like a great business model to me?
- indoordin0saur 3mo agoAll these bans on building data centers on Earth are starting to make this wild proposition seem a little more rational.
- Octoth0rpe 3mo agoOnly a little, not a lot. It seems like the easy answer is still terrestrial with a heck of a lot more giving back. For example: - offering to pay some nominal subsidy for all households electricity bills in the region. - committing to only closed loop cooling - if the location is amenable, then providing free heating to neighboring buildings. - only building in blighted locations with no current economic value Other random ideas: I wonder if anyone is considering building server racks directly into offshore windfarms. Replacing failed hardware is annoying, but surely more economical than in space where IIUC, there _is_ no plan to ever maintain hardware at all, just deorbit and replace. All the water is right there for cooling (though I'm sure saltwater has its own problems with corrosion). While the current US administration is clearly anti windmill, that might work nicely in Europe.
- defmetrix 3mo agoIve never understood why so many people seem to cheer for Elon's companies to fail.
- Retr0id 3mo agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schadenfreude#Psychological_causes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schadenfreude#Psychological_ca...
- thinkingtoilet 3mo agoBecause he's a psychopath who is actively making the world worse. Anyone who stands on stage with a chain saw and cuts US AID with a smile on his face is a truly horrible person. Anyone who hoards a trillion dollars while others starve is a truly horrible person. Did you root for the Empire in Star Wars? I hope nothing but the worst for him so maybe someone with a conscious and a soul replaces him.
- d4ng 3mo agoIt has helped me to live with the model that the probability of there being any sort of objective morality or ethics is close to zero, and that a hierarchy of influence within any given context is generally unavoidable. Once you accept this model, you spend less time moralising and angering yourself over perceived wrongs, and can now spend more time on figuring out how to live a happier life despite the fact that there are no set rules.
- simiones 3mo agoPeople generally hate to see scams stealing money from naive marks. Both SpaceX and Tesla are obvious scams at anything close to their current valuations (despite having real, functional businesses in there! ), that Elon keeps pumping up with ever more ridiculous claims (50 million humanoid robots by 2026/7! Tesla Roadster out by 2024, pre-order now! Starship point-to-point for business travel by 2030! Datacenters in space!).
- panick21_ 3mo agoI was a fan of early Elon. He had many problems but he was overall good. Then he turned full ultra right wing nationalist who engaged in science denial. Supported a president that is unquestionably racists and unquestionably fascists. And he made this clear by doing some Nazi salutes on top of that. Then he used that influence to sell a completely false idiotic story that cuts to discretionary spending could 'fix' the budget deficit, like a complete idiot who had never watched 2 youtube videos about the US budget. Then used to slash and burn many beneficial programs while having no impact on the deficit what so ever. He was supposed to be science and engineering progress driven, but then allied himself with ultra-right wing anti-scientific fascists who try to dismantle the whole education system in favor of at best best creationism or more likely nothing at all. Not sure why its hard to understand. The only people who don't understand are ultra-right wing facists who don't understand why other people don't want to support ultra-right wing facists. Does that explanation help?
- jitl 3mo agonoooo my stonks
- alexlesuper 3mo agoThis was completely predictable. Anyone with a brain looking at this stock would have shorted it.
- abtinf 3mo agoI’m way out of my depth in suggesting this idea, so forgive me if I’m committing a conceptual “divide by zero” and it’s not even wrong: It seems like the SpaceX IPO really breaks the traditional notion of market cap. Market cap has an unstated assumption that most of a company’s stock could, in theory, be traded unencumbered. Thus shares * price gives a very rough view of the value of the company. Everyone understands that this valuation has problems: it attributes the last marginal trade to the entire stock, and doesn’t account for large purchases/sales. But it’s useful nonetheless. But with SpaxeX, only a tiny fraction of those shares are even theoretically tradeable, so it seems bizarre to calculate valuation using price * shares. I think this is the source of discomfort around the $2T market cap. It seems like, similar to how there are long and short term liabilities, there should be long and short term market caps. “Short term market cap” would be price * “number of shares that could theoretically be available for trade within the next year”, from all sources (including vesting employee options, expiring lockups, etc). “Long term market cap” would be price * total authorized shares. So SpaceX’s long term market cap would remain at $2T and its short term market cap would be, say, 5% of that (about $100B).
- rsynnott 3mo agoNah, it's fairly common for only a relatively small part of a company to be tradeable.
- Beijinger 3mo agoNo, shares are shares. Public or not.
- jerf 3mo agoMarket cap has been that sort of fiction from the beginning. It's never been a terribly useful number. There's really no fixing it because the only way to "truly" value a company is to sell it, for real, on the open market. Anything else is just a guess. More or less educated, but a guess. SpaceX isn't creating this problem or making it particularly worse.
- pedrocr 3mo agoWhat you are describing is what's called free float market cap and is generally what market indices use to weigh stocks. That way you're only trying to replicate the market of stocks that are actually available to trade. There's nothing new about SpaceX in that respect, plenty of companies have float much lower than their total.
- cmiles8 3mo agoThere’s still really nothing keeping it at even these lower levels except pure hype. By the fundamentals typically applied to aggressive growth companies a “sane” price is closer to $40-60 and even that would be very aggressive considering the company’s financials. If the company doesn’t quickly show a financial picture that matches the sky high pro formas then even anything close to those levels will become extremely hard to justify. The bond markets have already turned very negative on SpaceX with extreme red flags developing there.
- segmondy 3mo agosomething something about fools and their money are easily parted.
- paulvnickerson 3mo agoI think people around here just dislike Elon Musk for his politics and are rooting for his stuff to fail at every turn.
- Beijinger 3mo agoSpaceX: The Biggest Money Loser in IPO History https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IHD8BDFYyGI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IHD8BDFYyGI
- shark1 3mo agoIt's typical to happen after IPOs. The same happened to: IBM, Meta, Google, Nvidia, Apple, and many others... PS: I am not saying SpaceX is a good investment.
- hunmernop 3mo agoBuy low sell high
- Balgair 3mo agoHonest question here: What does this mean for Anthropic's OPenAI's rumored IPOs?
- Zigurd 3mo agoOver in the past three months I've posted two polls on HN asking if one or both of the OpenAI and SpaceX IPO's would fail, with the definition of failure being dropping below IPO price by the end of the year, or the IPO failing altogether. The votes were against both IPOs succeeding. Albeit with a small sample, the results indicated skepticism early on. Anthropic could go either way. My guess is that if the financials aren't Enron scale flaming garbage, they'll be fine.
- panick21_ 3mo agoStill far to high. I love SpaceX as in 'space', they were a great company, doing things nobody else could. Now its a dumb AI company that hands over cash to micron, nvidia and friends who literally print money, while financing that with delusional promises. Many people can soon sell their SpaceX stock, I don't think the S&P will safe them later.
- sharts 3mo ago“The shares regained some ground later in the day, closing at $135.27.”
- ChrisArchitect 3mo agoRelated: SpaceX bond worth 10% less than issue price – heading for junk bond status https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48920181 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48920181
- tester756 3mo agoObvious mess. I bought it on IPO and sold 1-2 hours later with some gain
- Lerc 3mo agoIt surprises me that this seems so consequential to observers. According to a quick search, around 40% of IPOs are below their IPO price at their one year anniversary. I'm not invested in this myself, figuratively or literally. I guess for any stock to rise, there have to be people thinking it will be worth more in the future. I presume there is a way to mathematically determine how atypical the SoaceX stock is behaving. Does anyone have a reference to how this would normally be done?
- ratelimitsteve 3mo agoThis all feels like it was designed to artificially inject cash into xAI despite the average person being strongly against it. First they merge that company with SpaceX despite having very little in common in either of their infrastructure or goals, then they change the rules to get the stock out to the general public as quickly as possible on the promise that obviously it's going to explode in value and make everyone very rich to justify that decision, then once they have investor cash in-hand the stock price slips. I think they just tried to leverage SpaceX's relatively popular, positive image into investments into xAI by more or less giving up on SpaceX being anything but a wrapper around xAI.
- tim-tday 3mo agoCorrection, worst day so far.
- iamoseauditor 3mo agoI'm lost, what?