SpaceX IPO a success

Since a few times during the past week we were dancing around the topic of SpaceX's IPO today, it's convenient to end on that note and talk about it for a minute or two. 

I didn't have to look hard for this; this browser is Firefox under Windows 11 and what I think is the standard installation leaves lots of attention attractors on a blank tab. One of those today was a link to NPR (National Public Radio) who posted a summary of the IPO that seemed correct. 

SpaceX's newly listed stock leapt on its first day of trading on Friday, after an initial public offering that shattered records and made CEO Elon Musk the world's first trillionaire.

SpaceX stock, listed on the Nasdaq under the SPCX ticker, rose 19% on its first day of trading to close at $160.95. It became one of the world's biggest listed companies on its first day on the market, valued above $2 trillion.

The company raised some $75 billion selling more than 555 million shares at its offer price of $135,making it the biggest IPO in history.

While it might have been coincidence, NPR implies that to draw attention to the IPO, they launched a Falcon 9 carrying a load of Starlink satellites from Cape Canaveral. Which I happened to miss because of not remembering the correct launch time.  (By the time we get the rocket sounds here, the flight has been going for over two minutes and there's not much chance of seeing anything. Which is fine because I was in the bathroom and wouldn't have been able to get up and go watch, anyway.). 

Musk was at Starbase, Texas and had a group presentation with President Gwynne Shotwell and Chief Financial Officer Bret Johnsen. 

"Whoever you are watching this, SpaceX wants to be able to take you to the moon, take you to mars, and ultimately beyond," Musk said, noting it was hard to believe the company had just pulled off the biggest IPO ever.

"I gave SpaceX less than a 10% chance of succeeding at all, to be clear," he said of the company's early days. "In fact I told people this, I said 'look, we're probably going to fail, but you know we should give it a try because if we don't, if there's not a new company that enters space, we will never be a truly space-faring civilization."

One of the places I looked at while looking for news on this had a picture of a guy who started at SpaceX as a welder. As of today's market action, the shares he was given as a bonus made him a multimillionaire. Charles Payne of Fox Business had this take.