SpaceX ended its first trading day last Friday at $160.95, fixing its market capitalization at $2.1 trillion. The listing still set a record as the largest IPO in U.S. stock market history, but the final close did not satisfy every expectation built up before the debut. Research firm CFRA went as far as assigning SPCX a sell rating, underscoring the debate over whether Elon Musk’s Mars narrative was being fully accepted by public-market investors.
Monday’s rally lifts SpaceX to the world’s eighth-largest company
That hesitation was quickly challenged when U.S. trading opened on Monday. According to Gate U.S. equity market data, SPCX climbed throughout the session and closed at $192.5, up 19.6%. The closing price was also the day’s high. At that level, SpaceX’s valuation rose to $2.519 trillion, making it the eighth-largest company in the world by market capitalization.
The momentum extended into pre-market pricing. Hyperliquid data showed SPCX trading above $214 before the next U.S. session. The source article stated that, if the stock extended Monday’s rally after Tuesday’s open, SpaceX would move past Amazon, the company ranked seventh by market capitalization.
The broader market backdrop also turned supportive. The United States and Iran reached an understanding agreement during the week, a development treated as a major positive for U.S. equities. On June 15, Trump announced that an agreement with Iran had been reached and that the Strait of Hormuz would remain open. Unlike previous rounds of one-sided rhetoric, this agreement was also acknowledged by Iran. Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister Gharibabadi said the same day that the text of the U.S.-Iran memorandum of understanding had been finalized and would be formally signed in Switzerland on Friday, June 19.
The understanding was then confirmed again by Iran’s president. U.S. Vice President Vance said the agreement had already been signed electronically over the weekend, indicating that its terms had taken effect. After the news circulated, U.S. equities rose broadly: the Dow Jones Industrial Average gained 0.92%, the S&P 500 rose 1.65%, and the Nasdaq Composite advanced 3.07%.
Retail money concentrates heavily in SpaceX
Morgan Stanley’s view, as cited in the source, was that a long-term agreement between the United States and Iran, along with lower oil prices, would ease inflation pressure. The firm said U.S. equities were shifting from a narrow, single-leader market toward a healthier broad-based advance, with upward momentum no longer confined to technology shares and gradually spreading to a wider range of cyclical sectors.
Within that setting, SpaceX remained the single stock most aggressively pursued by retail investors. Vanda Track data showed that on June 16, U.S. local time, SpaceX recorded about $93.8 million in net retail buying in one day. That accounted for roughly 73% of total net retail inflows into all U.S. individual stocks that day. In practical terms, for nearly every four incremental retail dollars entering the U.S. stock market, about three flowed into SpaceX.
Demand for SPCX was strong enough that SpaceX’s underwriters exercised the IPO over-allotment option, also known as the greenshoe mechanism. They purchased an additional 83.33 million shares, bringing the total IPO issuance to 638,888,888 shares of Class A common stock. The move increased the total proceeds of the offering to $85.7 billion. The source described that scale as larger than almost every recorded over-allotment arrangement for a technology-company IPO.
Even after the larger issuance, reports said most eligible retail investors in the United States received only about one share in the SpaceX IPO allocation. With the float extremely tight and demand far exceeding available supply, concentrated retail buying was able to move the share price sharply.
Options, gamma squeeze discussion and investor commentary
On June 16, influential U.S. financial media outlet zerohedge wrote that once SPCX options begin trading, the stock price could rise to $400 through a gamma squeeze and surpass Nvidia. A gamma squeeze is an upward spiral caused when options market makers are forced to buy the underlying stock as prices rise in order to hedge their exposure. In the case of SpaceX, the float was described as extremely low at 4.2%, while retail demand remained very high. Retail investors who had not obtained SPCX shares could instead buy cheaper call options; if large amounts of money rushed into calls, market makers would need to keep buying SPCX spot shares for hedging, pushing the stock higher and creating a positive feedback loop. The 2021 surge in GameStop, or GME, was cited as one of the classic examples of this mechanism.
Institutional coverage and prominent investor views added another layer to the discussion. Before the U.S. market opened on June 15, Oppenheimer analyst Timothy Horan initiated coverage of SpaceX with an outperform rating and set a short-term price target of $190. After Monday’s trading session, SPCX closed at $192.5, broadly in line with that target.
On June 14, Peter H. Diamandis, the well-known entrepreneur, founder of XPRIZE and an early investor in SpaceX, wrote that SpaceX is a railroad in orbit and would open the path to a multi-planet civilization, creating enormous wealth in the same way that 19th-century railroads opened the American West. He also predicted that within the next year SpaceX and Tesla would merge and become the first $100 trillion company.
Diamandis added that over the past decade, whenever he released capital from other transactions, he put that money into Bitcoin. Now, he said, whenever he has idle capital, he invests in SpaceX. He acknowledged that the share price would decline when locked-up shareholders are allowed to sell and some holders cash out, but said he was investing in SpaceX not to pursue quarterly share-price gains, but to support the development of an off-Earth economy. On June 16, Silicon Valley investor Brad Gerstner said on the latest episode of the BG2 podcast that SpaceX is an asset institutional investors must buy and hold, because the company sits on two major themes at once: the space economy and the expansion of artificial-intelligence computing power.