SpaceX began its first public trading on Nasdaq midday Friday, opening at $150 per share, an 11% increase over the initial IPO price of $135 and enough to push SpaceX founder Elon Musk’s net worth over the $1 trillion mark on paper. Earlier in the day, SpaceX was indicated to open as high as $175 a share, but that price dropped to $150 throughout the morning.
SpaceX President and COO Gwynne Shotwell and SpaceX CFO Bret Johnsen rang the bell to open Friday’s trading on Wall Street. Musk rang the Nasdaq’s opening bell remotely from SpaceX headquarters in Texas. Musk said when he founded the company in 2002, he was certain it would fail. “If people had told me this was gonna happen, I was like… you must be smoking some really good crack, because I think this company’s gonna fail,” he said.
Musk also revived the company’s ambition to take humans to Mars, a long-term goal that the company had appeared to walk back in recent months. “We want to be able to take anyone who wants to go to the moon, anyone who wants to go to Mars, or anywhere in the solar system, and maybe beyond the solar system at some point, he said.
Shotwell then appeared on an interview with CNBC to address the debate over the company’s long-term valuation and total addressable market size. “We’re looking for long-term investors,” Shotwell said during the interview. “We don’t want to focus on quarterly results. I’m not saying we’re not going to do right by our investors, but what folks that invest in SpaceX need to know is that what we’re doing is very futuristic.”
She also stated that she sees no issue with the level of control Musk will have over the company even after the IPO. “There is no-one who can run this company other than Elon, frankly. We want Elon to have that kind of control,” she said.
SpaceX was trading at $164 a share at the time this article was written.
