Jordan Hale: SpaceX's stock closed on its first day at $160.95—a 19% pop from the $135 IPO price—yet the company only sold 4% of itself to the public, meaning 96% of SpaceX is still locked up, still private, still basically untouchable.
Alex Mercer: Yeah, and that's — the key point is that number tells you everything about what this IPO actually was, because a 4% float on a $75 billion raise is not a company opening its doors, it's a company cracking a window.
Jordan Hale: Right, and what's fascinating is when you zoom out — this is the largest IPO in history, we're talking a $2.1 trillion market cap on day one, sixth-largest public company in the United States, and Elon Musk still controls almost all of it.
Alex Mercer: Totally, and I think that's the tension we're going to sit with today — because on one hand the market said yes, loudly, a 19% first-day pop is loud, but on the other hand you have to ask what the public actually bought into here.
Jordan Hale: You know, it's like — someone shows you the lobby of a building and says 'you can own a piece of this' and you're like, incredible lobby, but I can't see any of the floors.
Alex Mercer: That's fair, and basically that's what we're unpacking today — whether a $2.1 trillion valuation on 4% of a rocket company is genius capital strategy or the most expensive velvet rope in financial history.
Alex Mercer: Five hundred fifty-five million, five hundred fifty-five thousand, five hundred fifty-five shares. That's the exact number SpaceX sold. Priced at $135. June 12th, 2026. Closed at $160.95.
Jordan Hale: Seventy-five billion dollars. I keep saying it and it just — it doesn't land. Saudi Aramco raised $29.4 billion in 2019 and everyone lost their minds. SpaceX did more than double that. In one day.
Alex Mercer: Two and a half times, actually. And the structure matters here — this was an all-primary offering. Every single dollar went to SpaceX's balance sheet. Not to Elon Musk. Not to early investors cashing out. To the company.
Jordan Hale: Wait — nobody sold anything?
Alex Mercer: Nobody. Which at this scale is genuinely unusual. Most big IPOs have secondary shares — insiders monetizing, early backers getting liquid. Here they're locked up. There's a lockup schedule, standard 90 to 180 days on some tranches, rolling out 18 to 24 months on others. Ninety-six percent of the company cannot trade right now.
Jordan Hale: Ninety-six percent frozen. And it still popped 19%. That's — okay, that's the part that gets me. You've got a sliver of the company available, retail demand that reportedly topped $100 billion before it even priced, all chasing $160.95. That's not price discovery. That's a controlled burn.
Alex Mercer: I'd push back on 'controlled.' There was a greenshoe option in this deal — Reuters described it as an overallotment option — lets underwriters buy back shares if the price drops too far below $135. So the floor was engineered. But the ceiling? That 19% pop? I don't think anyone planned for that.
Jordan Hale: Okay but doesn't that support what I'm saying? You've got a greenshoe holding the floor, 4% float creating scarcity, $100 billion in retail demand — the $160.95 close is almost meaningless as a signal of what this company is actually worth.
Alex Mercer: That's basically right. The pop tells you more about supply constraint than underlying value. And — I should have led with this — the intraday high was $176.52.
Jordan Hale: Wait, really? One seventy-six?
Alex Mercer: $176.52 intraday. Then it pulled back to $160.95 by close. That whole swing happened in a stock where 96% of the company isn't even tradeable yet.
Jordan Hale: So here's where I get genuinely confused — the $135 offer price implied a $1.77 trillion valuation. By close it's $2.1 trillion. That's $330 billion created in one afternoon. Is that underwriters leaving money on the table, or the market just deciding SpaceX is worth more than anyone priced in?
Alex Mercer: Honestly? Both. And they're not mutually exclusive. A big first-day pop is pretty standard evidence that underwriters set the price below market-clearing levels — that's not accidental, they want the IPO to look successful. But 19% on a $75 billion deal? That's a lot of value transferred from SpaceX's balance sheet to whoever got allocations.
Jordan Hale: I don't fully buy that framing though. SpaceX isn't Alibaba in 2014. It's not even Saudi Aramco in 2019. Those were big companies going public. This is a rocket company that also runs Starlink — a satellite internet network providing military comms in active conflict zones. Analysts genuinely don't have a box for it.
Alex Mercer: And that's the valuation problem. Price targets ranged from $63 on the bear end to $190 at Oppenheimer. That's a three-times spread. That's not disagreement — that's analytical confusion. Wolfe Research argued the launch business alone justifies the number because of the reusable rocket moat. And then Aswath Damodaran — guy who literally wrote the textbook on valuation — called it too richly priced at half the IPO price.
Jordan Hale: Half the IPO price — so Damodaran thought fair value was like $67?
Alex Mercer: Roughly. Which is a wild position to hold when the stock just closed at $160 and SpaceX is now the sixth-largest public company in the United States by market cap. Damodaran is not an idiot.
Jordan Hale: Sixth largest. SpaceX — a company Elon Musk founded in 2002 to make humanity multiplanetary — is now sitting next to Apple and Nvidia on that list. Like, just say that sentence out loud.
Alex Mercer: It is. And what makes it harder to evaluate — Starlink is a completely different business from the launch side. You've got satellite broadband, launch services, what's being called AI compute infrastructure, national security contracts. Four separate segments. Wall Street keeps reaching for this label 'strategic tech' — like that's a new category — and I'm not convinced it does any real analytical work. It might just be papering over the confusion.
Jordan Hale: See, I'd flip that. I think 'strategic tech' is actually right — not because it makes valuation easier, because it doesn't. But because it's accurate. Starlink is providing military comms. The U.S. government is effectively a customer. That's not a telecom business. That's closer to critical infrastructure. The premium might be real.
Alex Mercer: But that's also where the political risk concentrates. Musk has near-absolute control through a dual-class share structure. And his public statements have not always lined up with what's in the actual SEC filings — SpaceX filed a Free Writing Prospectus under Rule 433, registration file 333-296070. The formal documents are careful. The tweets are not.
Jordan Hale: Okay — wait. That loops back to something you said about the all-primary structure. If Musk isn't selling shares and insiders can't sell yet, he has every incentive to keep the stock up and behave. The lockup aligns his interests with public investors. At least for now.
Alex Mercer: For now. The question is what happens when those lockup tranches start rolling off late 2026 into 2027. You go from 4% float to something dramatically larger. If employees and early backers who've been waiting years start selling into that — that's when you find out whether $2.1 trillion was real or just a scarcity artifact.
Jordan Hale: That's the lockup cliff. And Cyclop SpaceTech did this float math analysis — they flagged three specific operational metrics that determine whether the opening-day valuation actually holds. Starlink subscriber growth, launch cadence, government contract renewals. If any of those slip, the premium evaporates. Elon's control structure doesn't save it.
Alex Mercer: Right. And Lighthouse Financial made a similar point around index inclusion — once SPCX gets added to major indices, you get forced passive buying, which puts a structural bid under the stock. But passive holders can't easily exit when the lockup cliff hits. It amplifies the volatility in both directions.
Jordan Hale: There's something Fortune flagged that I found — I mean, it's almost darkly funny? Some retail participants who thought they owned SpaceX shares through secondary market vehicles are going to find out they have no direct ownership of the public SPCX shares at all. They bought something that tracked SpaceX's private value and it's just — not the same thing. That's going to be a moment for some people.
Alex Mercer: That's a real problem. Secondary market instruments are not the same as holding SPCX on Nasdaq. And the leveraged products were already creating noise — $90 billion in daily notional volume on leveraged ETFs tracking SPCX within hours of listing. That makes normal price signals basically unreadable.
Jordan Hale: Ninety billion in leveraged ETFs on day one. That's more than the entire Aramco IPO.
Alex Mercer: More than double. And that's my whole issue with reading day-one performance as meaningful. Forced buying, momentum chasers, leveraged products amplifying every move, 4% float. June 12th is not the story. The story is whether $160.95 holds when the lockup cliff expands the float.
Jordan Hale: Can I push on the Elon premium though — because I think you keep treating it as pure risk and I want to argue the other side. The reason Starlink has military contracts, the reason the launch business has a reusable rocket moat that Wolfe Research is citing, the reason SpaceX went from a 2002 founding to the largest IPO in history — that's one person's execution. You can't fully separate the valuation from the person who built it.
Alex Mercer: I hear you. But execution premium and governance risk aren't separate things. The same concentration that built the moat is the same concentration that creates the single point of failure. If Musk's political exposure shifts — and those government contractor relationships are deep — you don't have a management team that built this. You have a company built around one person's judgment.
Jordan Hale: I don't fully disagree. I just think — everyone buying SPCX at $160 knows his name is on the tin. The market is choosing to pay through that risk. Knowingly.
Alex Mercer: Maybe. But here's what I keep coming back to. SpaceX raised $75 billion, surpassed Aramco by more than $45 billion, listed as SPCX on Nasdaq, and became the sixth-largest U.S. public company in one afternoon. All of that is real. But 96% is still locked up. We don't actually know yet if this is a $2.1 trillion company. We know it's a $2.1 trillion question.
Jordan Hale: Man, okay. What's fascinating is — we're sitting here talking about the sixth-largest public company in America, and the most honest thing you can say about its valuation is: we'll find out. Like, that's genuinely where we are. The number is real. The confidence behind the number is still a hypothesis.
Alex Mercer: Right. And I think that's the thing to hold onto. The IPO happened. The $75 billion is raised. That part is settled. What isn't settled is whether the market actually wants 96% more of this company at this price. That's not a cynical read — it's just the only honest one. The lockup expiry is the real IPO.
Jordan Hale: So the question I'm left with — and I genuinely don't know the answer — is whether Elon sells. Not employees, not early backers. Him. Because that move, whenever it comes, tells you everything about whether he believes the $2.1 trillion or whether he just built the most expensive exit ramp in history.
