SpaceX closed its first day of public trading last Friday at $160.95, fixing its market capitalization at $2.1 trillion. The company still set the record for the largest IPO in U.S. equity-market history, but the closing result did not fully match the expectations built into the pre-listing narrative. The gap between the launch-day valuation and the pre-IPO sentiment also left room for criticism: CFRA directly assigned SPCX a Sell rating, while the market debate around Elon Musk’s Mars story became more divided after the debut.
Monday’s rally took SPCX to a new post-listing level
That debate was quickly challenged when U.S. trading opened on Monday. According to Gate’s U.S. stock market data, SPCX climbed steadily after the open and finished at $192.5, up 19.6% for the session. The closing price was also the intraday high. At that level, SpaceX’s market value rose to $2.519 trillion, making it the eighth-largest company in the world by market capitalization.
The momentum had not faded in pre-market trading. Hyperliquid data showed SPCX’s pre-market price above $214. Based on the original article’s framing, the stock had a very high probability of extending Monday’s gains after the Tuesday U.S. open, with SpaceX’s market capitalization on track to move past Amazon, which ranked seventh globally.
The broader macro backdrop also turned more favorable for U.S. equities. The United States and Iran reached an understanding agreement, giving the stock market a supportive headline. On June 15, Donald Trump announced that an agreement had been reached with Iran and that the Strait of Hormuz would be opened. Unlike previous rounds of one-sided verbal confrontation, this agreement was also acknowledged by Iran. On the same day, Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister Gharibabadi said 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 agreement was further confirmed by Iran’s president. U.S. Vice President Vance said the agreement reached by the United States and Iran had been signed electronically over the weekend, indicating that the terms had taken effect and that the room for either side to tear up the agreement had narrowed. After the news spread, U.S. equities rose broadly at the open and closed higher: the Dow Jones Industrial Average gained 0.92%, the S&P 500 rose 1.65%, and the Nasdaq Composite advanced 3.07%.
Morgan Stanley’s view, as cited in the source article, was that a long-term U.S.-Iran agreement and lower oil prices would ease inflationary pressure. The firm said U.S. equities were moving away from a one-stock or narrow leadership market toward a healthier broad-based advance, with upward momentum no longer confined to the technology sector and gradually extending into a wider range of cyclical industries. SpaceX was listed among the beneficiaries of this improved equity-market environment.
Retail inflows and the greenshoe mechanism tightened the supply picture
From the perspective of market sentiment, SpaceX remained the stock most aggressively pursued by retail capital. Vanda Track data showed that on June 16, U.S. local time, SpaceX recorded about $93.8 million of net retail buying in a single day. That represented roughly 73% of all net retail inflows into individual U.S. stocks for the day. In practical terms, for nearly every $4 of incremental retail money entering the U.S. stock market, around $3 flowed into SpaceX.
With SPCX demand running at such a strong level, SpaceX’s underwriters exercised the IPO’s 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 Class A common shares. The total proceeds of the offering increased to $85.7 billion. The source article noted that this scale exceeded almost all recorded over-allotment arrangements for technology-company IPOs.
Even with the greenshoe shares, supply remained tight for ordinary investors. Reports cited in the source said most eligible U.S. retail investors received only about one share in the SpaceX IPO allocation. Under an extremely low free-float structure and intense demand, concentrated retail buying was enough to push the share price sharply higher.
Options, gamma squeeze mechanics and institution-facing commentary
On June 16, the U.S. equity-market financial media outlet zerohedge wrote that once SPCX options begin trading, the share price could rise to $400 and surpass Nvidia under a gamma-squeeze scenario. A gamma squeeze is an upward spiral created when options market makers are forced to buy the underlying stock as prices rise. The mechanism described in the source is straightforward: if retail investors who do not yet hold SPCX shares turn to relatively cheaper call options, heavy call buying forces market makers to hedge by buying SPCX spot shares, creating a positive feedback loop in the stock price.
The source highlighted two conditions that make this discussion central to SPCX: SpaceX’s free float is very low at 4.2%, and retail buying enthusiasm is extremely high. The article also pointed to the 2021 surge in GameStop, or GME, as one of the classic examples of a gamma-squeeze-driven rally.
Institutional and high-profile investor comments also entered the conversation. Before the U.S. market opened on June 15, Oppenheimer’s 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, essentially matching Oppenheimer’s target.
On June 14, Peter H. Diamandis, the founder of XPRIZE and an early investor in SpaceX, published a post calling SpaceX the railway in orbit. He said the company would open the path to a multi-planet civilization and create enormous wealth, similar to the way 19th-century railroads opened the American West. He also predicted that SpaceX and Tesla would merge within the next year and become the first $100 trillion company.
Diamandis added that over the past decade, whenever he released capital from other transactions, he would put that capital into Bitcoin. Now, he said, whenever he has idle capital, he invests it in SpaceX. He acknowledged that the share price could fall when locked-up shareholders are able to sell and when some shareholders cash out, but said his investment in SpaceX was not aimed at quarterly share-price gains. Instead, he framed the investment as part of the push toward an off-Earth economy.
On June 16, well-known Silicon Valley investor Brad Gerstner described SpaceX in the latest episode of the BG2 podcast as an asset that institutional investors must buy and hold. His reasoning, according to the source, was that the company sits at the intersection of two major themes: the space economy and the expansion of artificial-intelligence computing power.