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In the weeks following its dramatic IPO, Elon Musk’s SpaceX has yet to find stable ground.
After shooting up to an all-time high of over $225, shares of the rocket company have swung wildly back down to Earth, betraying plenty of uncertainty over the company’s dizzying, north-of-$2-trillion market cap. After all, the company is burning through billions of dollars in cash, and its path to profitability remains as uncertain as ever.
After days of rallying north of the $170 mark, shares took a beating on Wednesday, sliding over seven percent to just under $160, once again approaching its symbolically significant IPO price of $150. As of Wednesday afternoon, the company’s shares are trading almost 30 percent lower than their all-time high.
The drop could be a sign that investors are still trying to make sense of SpaceX’s enormous new valuation, a stunning price to sales ratio of over 115. Given the absence of profits, investors are effectively betting on Musk’s grandiose vision of a future filled with orbital AI data centers and colonies on the Moon and Mars, lofty goals that could take decades to come to fruition — if ever.
Despite the slide, some investors remain bullish. Wedbush analyst and famed Elon Musk supporter Dan Ives set a price target on SpaceX of $190.
“We view SpaceX as one of the most differentiated assets within the tech market with a strong footprint across its three core markets, with Starlink driving success with connectivity, Starship launches leading to a demand flywheel, and increasing deal flow for its Colossus [AI data centers],” he wrote in a note on Tuesday.
Ives argued that “all of SpaceX’s future business runs through Starship,” calling the enormous spacecraft that’s still in development the “single largest source of value in the franchise as much as its largest risk.”
Still, SpaceX is struggling to get the world’s largest and most powerful rocket off the ground. The spacecraft has yet to successfully make it to space and back in one piece, an alarming reality considering NASA’s extremely ambitious timelines that rely on it. The space agency wants to use Starship to deliver the first astronauts to the surface of the Moon in over half a century — and within the next two years.
Another element that could explain SpaceX’s wild Wall Street swings is that only roughly five percent of stocks were made available through the IPO last month, meaning that the vast majority of shares remain either restricted or locked up for either insiders or employees.
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