Juniper Vale: Long week, but I've been genuinely annoyed at a stock price for four days straight, so that's kept me sharp.
Mark Delaney: Annoyed at a stock price — that's a new one, what happened?
Juniper Vale: SPCX happened. SpaceX priced at $135 on June 11th, hit $225 by around June 16th, then dropped nearly 20% and erased something like $600 billion in market cap before landing around $170. And the whole ride up — I want to be direct about this — the whole ride up was not the market figuring out what SpaceX is worth.
Mark Delaney: Okay but, uh — wasn't the demand like genuinely massive? I thought the thing was oversubscribed.
Juniper Vale: Four times oversubscribed, yes. And they raised $75 billion — more than Saudi Aramco raised in 2019, which was the prior record at $29.4 billion. So the demand was real. But here's what demand ran into: a 4% float. Ninety-six percent of shares were locked up when trading started on the Nasdaq on June 12th.
Mark Delaney: Wait, seriously — 4%? So you've got, what, the world's biggest IPO ever and you can only actually buy a sliver of it?
Juniper Vale: That's exactly the mechanism. And there's this image that kind of captures the whole weird energy — Gwynne Shotwell, SpaceX's president, is at Nasdaq in New York ringing the bell, and Elon Musk is doing it remotely from Texas. Two bells, two locations, one stock with almost no actual shares to trade. That split-screen is kind of the whole story.
Mark Delaney: He couldn't even show up to his own company going public — that's kinda the vibe, isn't it.
Juniper Vale: I mean, that's one read. The question I actually want to dig into today is whether the $170 price it's sitting at now means anything real, or whether it's still floating on fumes from that squeeze.
Mark Delaney: Okay but — that $170 number, I want to pump the brakes there for a second. Because Morningstar put out a fair-value estimate of $63 a share. Sixty-three. Against $170. That's not a rounding error, that's like... you want to buy a house listed at $170,000 and the only independent appraiser in town hands you back a report that says $63,000. You might still buy it, sure. But 'the neighborhood feels hot' had better not be your whole reason.
Juniper Vale: The gap is 169%. That number is real.
Mark Delaney: Right — but the part that doesn't fit is, uh, this is not a money-losing startup. Musk said on a JPMorgan Chase livestream that SpaceX has been cash-flow positive since around 2015. So Morningstar isn't looking at a company bleeding cash. They're looking at a profitable company and still saying $63.
Juniper Vale: Which makes the gap harder to explain away, not easier. If it were losing money you could at least say 'well, growth story.' Cash-flow positive since 2015 and the model still spits out $63 — that tells you the $170 price is carrying assumptions Morningstar isn't willing to bake in.
Mark Delaney: Like what assumptions exactly?
Juniper Vale: Starlink tripling subscribers. Starship becoming commercially profitable on a specific timeline. Maybe some AI revenue line that doesn't fully exist yet. All of them hitting. The market priced in a flawless execution scenario — and the 4x oversubscription tells you that demand was emotional, not analytical. People wanted in.
Mark Delaney: So the appraiser's not wrong, the buyer's just... betting the neighborhood gentrifies exactly on schedule.
Juniper Vale: That's it. And the complication is — they might be right. The gap is real AND contested. That's what makes this genuinely hard, not just a story about irrational retail buyers.
Mark Delaney: But that's the part I keep getting stuck on — like, the gap is hard to explain away even if they might be right. So what did day one actually look like mechanically? Because I want to understand if the price was ever... real.
Juniper Vale: Okay, day one — opened at $150, hit $176.52 intraday, closed at $161. Nineteen percent gain. Over 500 million shares traded. And Jim Cramer, same day, goes on CNBC and praises Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, J.P. Morgan — says the underwriters did a great job keeping first-day gains modest.
Mark Delaney: Wait — modest? It was up nineteen percent on day one.
Juniper Vale: Modest by IPO-pop standards, yeah. And then four days later it's at $225. The best underwriting team on Wall Street, and they could not hold price discovery on a 4% float. That's not a criticism of Goldman — that's just physics. You cannot engineer fair value from a sliver.
Mark Delaney: So picture someone — uh, let's say a guy named Dave, sitting at his kitchen table, sees $225 on his phone on June 16th. He wasn't in the IPO. He's just hitting buy on a retail app. And he thinks he's buying SpaceX. But what he's actually buying is... the momentum of a hundred thousand Daves doing the same thing at the same moment.
Juniper Vale: That's exactly it. The price wasn't informational — it was mechanical. And then there's a governance layer on top of that the market completely ignored, which is where it gets genuinely strange to me.
Mark Delaney: What do you mean governance layer?
Juniper Vale: The Guardian looked at Elon Musk's posting on X during the IPO run-up. He posted about UK race and immigration roughly twice as often as he posted about SpaceX. The S-1 only went public May 20th — that's three weeks before trading started. And by early July, Congressional disclosure inquiries had emerged, CNBC reported it. So you've got a CEO visibly split, regulators asking questions, investors who had three weeks to read the filing — and none of that showed up in the price. And we'll actually get into what might force the price to reckon with reality — there are two specific dates on the calendar that change everything — but that's coming.
Mark Delaney: Twice as often. Man. That's not a vibe thing — that's a documented ratio. And Congress is already asking questions after, what, six weeks of it being public?
Juniper Vale: Six weeks, yeah. And that's actually the part that matters going forward — because those questions don't get answered by the stock price. They get answered by two specific dates. August earnings. December lockup.
Mark Delaney: Okay, walk me through December first, because — uh, I keep hearing lockup expiration and I think I know what it means but maybe I don't.
Juniper Vale: That 96% that's locked up right now? December is when insiders can sell it. All of it, potentially. And the question isn't whether they will — it's what the fact that they CAN tells you. If the people who built this company, who know every Starlink subscriber number and every Starship cost overrun, look at $170 and say — I'm holding — that's real signal. If they sell, that's the actual price discovery the IPO never gave us.
Mark Delaney: That's the referendum nobody voted in yet.
Juniper Vale: Exactly. And August comes first — that's the structural stress test. Flat Starlink subscriber growth in that report, or no material AI revenue line, and the market has its first real fundamental data point against a $170 price. Not a vibe. An actual number.
Mark Delaney: The IPO was priced at a fixed $135, no traditional bookbuilding range at all. Like, there was never a price negotiation with the market. So the whole thing from $135 to $225 and back to $170, that's not... that's not price discovery, that's just drift. Until August.
Juniper Vale: That's the defensible claim. Every price between Morningstar's $63 and the $225 peak is more mechanical than informational until those two catalysts actually fire. Someone who bought at $225 on June 16th isn't waiting for a feeling to change. They're waiting for August to tell them if Starlink's growing or not.
Mark Delaney: And if it isn't — if August is flat — they've got four more months holding into a December where 96% of the company can walk out the door. That's a rough place to be sitting.
Juniper Vale: I'll be honest with you — that's actually the most unsettling part of all of it. Not the $225 spike, not even the Morningstar gap. It's that December is where the IPO really happens. Everything before that is just... a pump-and-pause.
Mark Delaney: Pump-and-pause. Yeah. That's the whole thing, isn't it. SpaceX raised $75 billion, broke Saudi Aramco's record, and we still don't know what the stock is worth. Morningstar says $63, the market says $170, and 96% of the company can't move until December. That's not a price. That's a placeholder.
Juniper Vale: And the 169% gap between those two numbers just... sits there, open. Nothing about the IPO closed it.
Mark Delaney: Uh — no. It really didn't.
Juniper Vale: Good talk. That was genuinely worth being annoyed about.
