The SpaceX IPO made history. One month on has it lost momentum?

A month on from the firm's stock market debut, the reality of how SpaceX currently makes money has seemed to come into clearer focus.

SpaceX investors have swung from celebration to apparent concern in its first month as a publicly traded company. When shares in the firm, co-founded and led by Elon Musk, first became available for individuals to buy on the public stock market on 12 June, there was an investor frenzy. Although the company had decided to price its shares at $135 each, the price immediately shot up to $150 that first day, climbing to $176, before closing at $160.95.

It solidified SpaceX as the largest initial public offering (IPO) of all time. The following week, its shares went up even further, hitting an intraday high of $225, meaning it had surpassed Amazon and Microsoft in total market value. "With Elon Musk, any company he touches gets people excited," Keith Snyder, analyst at investment research firm CFRA, said.

"But this was also the first time people felt like they were able to invest in something that was being marketed as an AI play." Willy Lee, an investor at Neosteller, which facilitates individual investors putting money into private companies, agreed that the excitement around the IPO was very much around artificial intelligence (AI). "Everyone saw SpaceX as an AI story," he said.

SpaceX earlier this year acquired Musk's AI start-up xAI, recently renamed SpaceXAI and best known for the controversial chatbot Grok, and also started leasing data centre capacity to other tech companies. But its main business is the manufacture and launch of rockets and telecommunications satellites called Starlink. When Starlink said it was cutting prices in the Memphis, Tennessee area amid local concerns over a massive data centre project, SpaceX shares fell on the day by 8%.

As the reality of how SpaceX currently makes money has seemed to come into clearer focus, the company's shares have started to sink. Even amid a tumultuous couple of weeks for tech stocks, SpaceX has taken a particular hit. When it was added to the Nasdaq100 index on 7 July, for instance, although the index closed down 1.7%, SpaceX fell 4.4%.

An earlier addition to the FTSE Russell index had given the shares a slight boost. SpaceX did not respond to a request for comment. At the end of its first trading month, shares of SpaceX were selling at around $145 each, roughly 18% less than the high on its first day of trading, and 35% less than its peak so far.

'Definitely underwater' Such a drop in price means that retail investors who purchased SpaceX stock during its first five days of trading are looking at a potential loss on their investment.