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At first, it felt like the sky was the limit. After its blockbuster Wall Street debut on Friday, SpaceX shares spiked dramatically as pent-up demand pushed the stock up to the $220s per share.
But investors are Elon Musk’s rocket company soon started asking some tough questions, with shares falling into steady decline this week, wiping out most of those initial gains.
Shares slipped by almost five percent on Wednesday. By around noon on Thursday, the situation didn’t look much better, slumping another almost ten percent after a bruising night.
At the time of writing, shares are hovering around the $173 mark, down over 20 percent over its all-time high on Tuesday.
The elephant in the room remains SpaceX’s enormous multitrillion-dollar valuation. Unlike most of the other ventures on the list of the world’s most valuable businesses, SpaceX is losing billions of dollars a year. Its merger with Musk’s AI startup xAI has saddled it with even more losses.
Put simply, an investment in SpaceX is either a vote of confidence in Musk’s lofty vision of the distant future — or a risky get-rich-quick scheme.
“The stock is called SpaceX, but it might as well be called Elon Musk,” CNBC host Jim Cramer quipped earlier this week. “There is no way this company, which could see losses for many years, deserves such a high valuation on its own. It only gets there because it’s run by Musk.”
Even analysts who maintain an optimistic buy rating of SpaceX are wondering what’s going on, as Bloomberg reports.
Nonetheless, many remain bullish. Today, investment bank Oppenheimer upped its price target from $190 to $250, citing SpaceX’s acquisition of AI coding company Anysphere.
SpaceX “owns every layer of the AI stack, giving it cost and quality advantages,” Oppenheimer analyst Timothy Horan told Investing.com.
One interesting aspect of SpaceX’s IPO to watch going forward is Musk’s EV maker, Tesla, whose enormous valuation similarly rests largely on good faith and not business fundamentals. The carmaker’s shares have also been facing a downturn since SpaceX went public, sliding 1.4 percent over the past five days.
Both companies are tied to confidence in Musk’s extremely ambitious visions, from humanoid robots taking a central role in the labor market to a massive constellation of data centers — both unproven concepts with immense technical challenges standing in their way.
Nobody knows where SpaceX will go from here, but if there’s one thing investors can be sure of, it’s that the volatility has only just begun.
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