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Less than two weeks after SpaceX’s debut on the New York Stock Exchange, the company’s shares plunged, at a time when markets are pulling back on big technology companies. Elon Musk saw 350 billion dollars, around 306 billion euros, disappear from his net worth.
SpaceX shares soared after the June 12 Initial Public Offering, rising from an opening price of $150 to an all-time high slightly above trading. $225 — which led the company’s market capitalization to approach 3 billion dollars, and made Elon Musk o .
But in the following days, many investors began to lose confidence, dissipating hundreds of billions of dollars in value as stocks fell — first slowlythen with an increasingly accentuated acceleration.
Only on Monday, shares sank almost 17%the company’s worst daily performance to date, notes .
On Tuesday morning, SpaceX’s 11-day maiden voyage on the stock exchange symbolically ended with shares falling below opening pricereaching a historic low just above 147 dollars.
In other words, SpaceX officially lost all winnings registered since listing on the stock exchange. Later, the shares recovered to intermediate values of around 150 dollars, a level that would have been unthinkable just a few days earlier.
As SpaceX shares fall, 350 billion dollars disappeared from Elon Musk’s net worth — that the esteem he reached, after the IPO and the initial appreciation, the 1.4 billion dollars.
Musk is thus a little poorer, but remains the first (and only) billionaire in the world, by a “small” margin: around 50 billion dollars.
Volatility highlights the extent to which the Musk narrative about artificial intelligence in space is disconnected from realitytaking into account the company’s still fragile fundamentals and a sharp difference between price and profits that is strongly reminiscent of its electric vehicle manufacturer, Tesla.
The company has spent billions of dollars to finance its activity and, even so, seeks to raise additional tens of billions to implement a orbital data centers whose viability has yet to be demonstrated.
SpaceX’s sharp fall coincided with a widespread sale of technology stocks globally, fueled by persistent fears of an artificial intelligence bubble. AMD fell almost 5% mid-morning on Tuesday, while AI chipmaker Nvidia fell more than 2.6%.
Analysts predict that some of SpaceX’s volatility may decrease when more shares become available for trading in the coming months. But given the performance of the last week or so, investors are likely to have an eventful journey aheadas they try to gauge how much enthusiasm remains around Musk’s bold ambitions.
