SpaceX overtakes Amazon as its post-IPO rally rolls on

SpaceX is now worth more than Amazon, at least for as long as the rally holds. Shares of the rocket company rose more than 10% on Tuesday, extending a run that began at its market debut and putting it on course to become the world’s fifth most valuable listed company, four trading days after it went public.

The stock was last up 10.1% at $211.80, according to Reuters, which works out to a market capitalisation of nearly $2.8tn if the gains stick. Amazon was last valued at $2.66tn.

The move followed a 19% jump on Monday, the first full day of trading, which itself followed a debut that already ranked as the largest initial public offering ever attempted.

The numbers underneath the rally are unusual enough to merit a second look. More than $1.16bn worth of SpaceX shares changed hands, which Reuters reported was several times the combined trading volume in Nvidia, Microsoft, Tesla, and Apple. A newly listed company outtrading four of the most heavily traded stocks on the market, put together, is not a normal week on the Nasdaq.

Much of that comes down to scarcity. SpaceX’s IPO floated only about 4.2% of the company’s shares, rising to roughly 4.9% once underwriters exercised the greenshoe option in full.

That leaves an extremely thin free float chasing heavy retail demand, the kind of supply-demand mismatch that can move a price far and fast in either direction. A small float is a wonderful thing on the way up.

The starting point was already historic. SpaceX priced its IPO at $135 a share for a $1.75tn valuation, raising $75bn in what TNW and others called the biggest listing on record.

The stock drew demand from retail investors worldwide, including $2.2bn from Japanese buyers alone, a measure of how broad the appetite ran before the first share traded.

The valuation it is now testing rests on a business with one profit engine and several expensive bets. Starlink, the satellite-internet division, generated the bulk of SpaceX’s revenue and effectively all of its operating profit last year, even as its growth maths has got harder and average revenue per user has slipped.

Starship and the xAI operations remain capital sinks that investors are pricing for years of growth they have not yet seen.

For Elon Musk, the arithmetic is personal as well as corporate. The listing handed him a paper fortune large enough to make him a trillionaire, and his and insiders’ voting control of the company survived the float intact. Tuesday’s climb adds to that total on paper, though paper is the operative word while the float stays this thin.

If SpaceX holds the fifth-place spot is a question for the closing bell rather than the premarket tape. A stock that can rise 19% in a day on a sliver of available shares can give the gain back on the same mechanics. For now, a company that was private a week ago is trading just behind Amazon, and the market is still deciding what that is worth.