SpaceX investors have swung from celebration to apparent concern in its first month as a publicly traded company.

When shares in the firm, co-founded and led by Elon Musk, first became available for individuals to buy on the public stock market on 12 June, there was an investor frenzy.

Although the company had decided to price its shares at $135 each, the price immediately shot up to $150 that first day, climbing to $176, before closing at $160.95.

It solidified SpaceX as the largest initial public offering (IPO) of all time.

The following week, its shares went up even further, hitting an intraday high of $225, meaning it had surpassed Amazon and Microsoft in total market value.

"With Elon Musk, any company he touches gets people excited," Keith Snyder, analyst at investment research firm CFRA, said. "But this was also the first time people felt like they were able to invest in something that was being marketed as an AI play."

Willy Lee, an investor at Neosteller, which facilitates individual investors putting money into private companies, agreed that the excitement around the IPO was very much around artificial intelligence (AI).

"Everyone saw SpaceX as an AI story," he said.

SpaceX earlier this year acquired Musk's AI start-up xAI, recently renamed SpaceXAI and best known for the controversial chatbot Grok, and also started leasing data centre capacity to other tech companies.

But its main business is the manufacture and launch of rockets and telecommunications satellites called Starlink. When Starlink said it was cutting prices in the Memphis, Tennessee area amid local concerns over a massive data centre project, SpaceX shares fell on the day by 8%.

As the reality of how SpaceX currently makes money has seemed to come into clearer focus, the company's shares have started to sink.

Even amid a tumultuous couple of weeks for tech stocks, SpaceX has taken a particular hit.

When it was added to the Nasdaq100 index on 7 July, for instance, although the index closed down 1.7%, SpaceX fell 4.4%. An earlier addition to the FTSE Russell index had given the shares a slight boost.

SpaceX did not respond to a request for comment.

At the end of its first trading month, shares of SpaceX were selling at around $145 each, roughly 18% less than the high on its first day of trading, and 35% less than its peak so far.

'Definitely underwater'

Such a drop in price means that retail investors who purchased SpaceX stock during its first five days of trading are looking at a potential loss on their investment.

"If you bought around the first tick you're definitely underwater," Snyder said.

"It started to look a lot like a meme stock," Snyder added, pointing to the examples of GameStop and, more recently, Wendy's, where retail investors drive up a stock price through little more than excited online conversation.

He expects SpaceX to dip even further, to around $115 a share, based on the company's business performance. That would value the company at around $1.5 trillion.

Samuel Kerr, who heads analysis of equity capital markets for Mergermarket, noted that the swings in the share price so far will have had a different impact on different investors.

"If you're an IPO investor, you're ok," Kerr said, referring to groups of investors who were either able to buy SpaceX at the company's proposed listing price of $135, or who were insiders with pre-IPO equity in the company.

"If you bought in the first few days, you're not very happy right now," Kerr added.

Nevertheless, Musk has expressed little but enthusiasm for the business prospects of SpaceX.

After the company's public listing made him the world's first trillionaire, Musk said that SpaceX would pull in $1tn in yearly revenue by 2030.

Musk has also shown that he is ready and willing to use SpaceX shares, and their volatility, as a currency.

When the share price spiked on 16 June, SpaceX announced it was acquiring Cursor, a start-up that created an AI bot for writing computer code, in an all-stock deal valued at $60bn.

By doing so at that time, Musk essentially bought Cursor for free, given how much value SpaceX stock had gained at that exact time.

"It showed a level of market sophistication that almost no other issuer has," Kerr said of the Cursor acquisition.

SpaceX shares have drifted down since.

All eyes on earnings

Morgan Stanley, which was a lead banker on the SpaceX IPO, seems to think the dip will be an interlude.

It last week initiated coverage by its financial analysts and put a target share price on the company of $300, a 33% jump from its highest trading price to date.

SpaceX currently operates at a loss and last year it made $18bn in revenue, according to financial disclosures required for it to go public.

Musk's projected $1tn in revenue is roughly 55 times that.

At the moment, anticipation is building around the company's first public earnings report. SpaceX has not yet announced a date for this, but financial analysts are expecting it to happen in early August.

The company's earnings will likely coincide with the end of what's known as a "lock-up" period, when SpaceX employees who have been prohibited from selling shares in the firm that they received as part of their compensation will be able to shift them on to the open market.

More shares for sale, plus a potentially more detailed explanation of SpaceX's business and future growth could create further dramatic swings in price.

"If SpaceX can do all the things it says it will do, yes, investors are sitting on the most valuable company ever," Kerr said.

"But it's got a lot of work to do to get there." (BBC)

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