SpaceX Briefly Falls Below I.P.O. Price of $135

SpaceX, Elon Musk’s rocket and artificial intelligence company, dropped below its initial public offering price of $135 on Wednesday before closing the day slightly above it, raising questions for other tech companies aiming to test the public markets.SpaceX shares fell more than 2.5 percent in intraday trading to below the $135 price when the company went public last month, before ending the trading day at $135.27.Its I.P.O., which was the largest ever, raised $85.7 billion and suggested that investors were hungry not only for SpaceX but also for potentially large public market debuts by the A.I.

companies Anthropic and OpenAI.Yet SpaceX’s bumpy ride may have Wall Street thinking otherwise.The company’s market capitalization briefly surpassed Amazon’s and Microsoft’s last month, nearing $3 trillion after its shares reached $225.64.

It is now valued at around $1.782 trillion after days of declines.Already, OpenAI has been leaning toward holding off its public offering until next year.

Sam Altman, the chief executive, pushed the company’s investment bankers and others to find a way for the start-up to be valued at $1 trillion when it goes public, up from its last private valuation of $730 billion.SpaceX’s fluctuations were not unexpected given the exuberance among institutional and retail investors during the public offering and the relatively low number of shares available to trade.Fewer than 5 percent of the company’s outstanding shares are able to be bought and sold, and the heavy demand in the days after the I.P.O.

contributed to the spike in price.Drew Cupps, a portfolio manager at Polen Capital, which invested in SpaceX after its public offering, attributed the stock’s drop to a “reversal in investor optimism around data center spending.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.If you are in Reader mode please exit and log...