SpaceX Pops 20% on Day One — Retail Wants In, S&P 500 Said 'Nah'
The biggest IPO in history landed on Nasdaq this week — here's what retail sentiment actually says about the trade
Ticker Ratings
$STCX opened at $150 against a $135 IPO price, briefly touching a $1.7 trillion valuation — making it the largest IPO in history with $75 billion raised and the deal reportedly 5x oversubscribed, plus ~$100 billion in retail demand alone. Crypto derivatives markets were pricing in a 35%+ first-day pop before the bell even rang. When was the last time prediction markets gave 70% odds a stock closes above a $2 trillion cap on day one? That's not investing, that's a religion.
The bull case is genuinely wild: Altimeter Capital's Brad Gerstner flagged $27 billion in AI data center contracts secured in just six weeks from Anthropic and Google. Walter Isaacson called Starlink's 10,000-satellite constellation literally the internet rebuilt in space. Meanwhile, Nasdaq quietly rewrote its index eligibility rules — meaning passive 401k flows could soon be chasing this thing automatically. The S&P 500, however, stonewalled fast-track inclusion, citing profitability requirements. SpaceX is priced at roughly 95x revenue. Aggressive? Sure. Unreasonable? Ask the people who took 100% equity comp with zero salary back in 2002.
The real risk isn't the valuation — it's the single-name dependency. Gwynne Shotwell herself said the company would survive without Elon, just be 'a different company.' In SpaceX terms, that's the fine print nobody's reading while they're popping champagne in Times Square.