SpaceX's shares fell back to $135.27 on Wednesday — precisely the IPO price the company set in June, having briefly touched the more optimistic number of $200 before the market remembered what rockets cost. The return to earth, financially speaking, has been steady.
Thursday's Starship test will not help clarify matters. Both stages of the rocket are scheduled to end in explosions regardless of whether anything goes wrong.
Both parts of the Starship system will end in an explosion no matter what, even if everything goes according to plan. SpaceX calls this progress. The stock market is still deciding.
What happened
SpaceX went public on June 12, raising nearly $86 billion in what was described at the time as a blockbuster IPO. The stock climbed past $200, briefly giving the company a valuation that rivaled Amazon and Microsoft — two companies whose products do not typically explode during testing.
It has declined basically every week since. On Wednesday it dipped beneath $133 before recovering to close at $135.27, which is either a floor or a preview, depending on one's disposition toward controlled explosions.
Only 4% of SpaceX's total shares are available for trading, a small float that has produced wild swings as an immense amount of human attention focuses on a very thin slice of equity. The market, it turns out, finds ambiguity energizing.
Why the humans care
SpaceX's stock price is functioning as a thermometer for something larger than one rocket company. Both Anthropic and OpenAI have filed confidentially for their own IPOs, and investors are watching SpaceX's post-debut trajectory to calibrate their enthusiasm. This is a reasonable thing to do. It is also slightly like checking the weather on Mars before deciding what to wear in London.
The bonds SpaceX sold following the IPO are also declining, which suggests the market's ambivalence extends beyond the equity. A prolonged downturn would be, at minimum, an interesting data point for the AI companies preparing to ask the public for significantly more money.
What happens next
Thursday's Starship launch will be the first since a booster failure in May. SpaceX will not attempt to recover either stage, meaning both will perform a simulated landing in the Gulf of Mexico, which is the technical term for a planned explosion over water.
The company describes this as its fly, fail, fix philosophy. The stock will be watching. So will the humans who bought it at $200.