SpaceX shares fall below $135 IPO price: UK investor impact

The honeymoon is over for the biggest flotation in stock market history. SpaceX shares fell below their $135 IPO price for the first time on Wednesday, leaving thousands of UK retail investors who put £271 million into Elon Musk’s space venture staring at paper losses barely a month after its debut.

Shares in the satellite, rockets and artificial intelligence company slid 2.5 per cent to $132.64 in lunchtime trading, dipping under the price set when it made its stock market debut on June 12. The stock pared its losses to close at $135.27, down $0.81, or 0.6 per cent, on the day.

It is a sobering moment for a listing that only last month saw shares touch $150 on day one. The oversubscribed float attracted huge global interest from institutional and ordinary investors alike, promoted by 23 banks including Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, Citigroup and JPMorgan Chase, which are reported to have collectively earned hundreds of millions in fees.

For the ordinary savers who piled in, the picture is less rosy. SpaceX courted retail investors on an unprecedented scale in the run-up to the float, allocating 20 per cent of IPO shares to non-professional investors drawn to Musk and his pledge to build “the systems and technologies necessary to make life multiplanetary”. UK retail investors alone spent £271 million to be part of it.

Many of those backers will be business owners and entrepreneurs who saw the float as a once-in-a-generation opportunity. The outlook for anyone who bought at the IPO price and held on is now uncertain.

The fundamentals have not changed since the company lifted the veil on its finances ahead of the listing. SpaceX, founded in 2002, made its name building rockets and launching satellites, but most of its $18.7 billion in revenue last year came from its Starlink satellite internet business. The company reported $4.9 billion in net losses in 2025.

What has changed is the mood.

“There hasn’t been anything lately to remind people of some of the catalysts for why they bought SpaceX,” said Steve Sosnick, chief market analyst at Interactive Brokers.

“The fact that a stock has fallen a couple of dollars below its IPO price in itself is not a tragedy but SpaceX is heavily watched and has an important role in investor psyche.”

The numbers involved remain staggering. SpaceX raised about $86 billion in its IPO and ended its first trading day valued at roughly $2.1 trillion, making Musk the world’s first trillionaire. By Wednesday afternoon in New York the valuation had drifted to $1.8 trillion.

Musk’s own net worth has fallen to an estimated $861 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, though he remains comfortably the world’s richest man, ahead of Google co-founder Larry Page on $306 billion.

For UK business owners, the episode is a timely reminder that even the most feverishly hyped listings obey gravity. First-day pops reward those who sell, not those who hold, and the Financial Conduct Authority’s guidance on understanding high-risk investments makes the point plainly: the higher the potential return, the higher the risk of losing your money.

A $2.64 dip below the float price is hardly a catastrophe. But for the small investors who helped bankroll the largest IPO in history, the rocket ride has, for now at least, gone into reverse.

Jamie Young

Jamie Young is Senior Reporter at Business Matters, covering SME finance, employment law and Westminster policy since 2016. He has reported on every Budget and Autumn Statement since 2018, helped make sense of the ‘covid era’ and the bounce-back loan scheme from launch through the fraud investigations, and broke the magazine’s coverage of the 2024 late-payment reforms. He joined Business Matters straight from completing his BA in Administration from Exeter University and is NCTJ-qualified. Reach him at jyoung@cbmeg.co.uk