SpaceX rockets past Amazon and Microsoft to become world’s fourth biggest company in
SpaceX has rocketed past Amazon and Microsoft to become the fourth largest company in the world just three days after its record-breaking stock market listing.
Shares jumped another 17 per cent in early trading on Tuesday – taking gains since its initial public offering (IPO) in New York on Friday to around 60 per cent.
That pushed the value of SpaceX to close to $3trillion – making it the fourth biggest company in the world ahead of Amazon and Microsoft.
‘We can say with certainty that this valuation makes absolutely no sense today. People are buying SpaceX in the expectation that others will buy too and push the price higher – that’s speculation,’ said Ipek Ozkardeskaya, senior market analyst at Swissquote Bank.
The latest share price rise came as Elon Musk’s rocket company, which has ambitions to colonise Mars and build data centres on the Moon, struck a $60billion deal to buy the company behind AI coding agent Cursor.
The acquisition of Anysphere could give the xAI arm of SpaceX that makes chatbot Grok a stronger foothold in AI coding.
SpaceX shares have soared since it listed on the stock market in New York on Friday
Although SpaceX has overtaken Amazon and Microsoft, it is still some way off AI chip designer Nvidia, which is valued at $5.1trillion, and also trails behind Google owner Alphabet and Apple.
The surge in the share price is a boon for Britain’s army of armchair investors who ploughed £270million into SpaceX shares in the IPO.
Someone investing £2,000 would now be sitting on stock worth around £3,200.
The listing has also propelled the wealth of co-founder and boss Elon Musk into the stratosphere – making him the world’s first trillionaire.
Richard Hunter, head of markets at Interactive Investor, said the SpaceX IPO ‘has captured the imagination of investors’.
He said it could ‘take a number of days for the dust to settle’ but added ‘the early indications are clearly that this is a stock which investors are adding to their growth portfolios’ rather than selling ‘for a quick profit’.
However, concerns remain about the elevated valuation of the company given it is loss-making and is likely to remain so for some time as it spends billions building huge data centres on Earth and in orbit to power the AI revolution.
Chris Beauchamp, chief market analyst at IG, added: ‘SpaceX might only be in its third full day of life as a listed company, but it continues to clock up new milestones.
‘It is far too big to ignore, which makes it a problem. Can the wider market weather a SpaceX slump when one arrives, as it almost always does? Euphoria is all very well, but it can turn very quickly.’
Ozkardeskaya described SpaceX as ‘the biggest meme stock in town’.
Warning the stellar share price gains represent a ‘speculative bubble’, she said: ‘The risk is that one day, someone will say, “Hey, the Emperor is naked,” and on that day, the company’s fundamentals won’t be there to stop the selloff.’
Ozkardeskaya said she does not expect SpaceX to suffer the same fate as other meme stocks such as GameStop and AMC which have fallen 80 per cent and 99 per cent respectively since their peaks.
‘I don’t expect SpaceX to share a similar destiny, as it still has Starlink and a few xAI data centres that it could lease out to generate decent revenue,’ she said.
‘But at the end of the day, whoever is buying as if there is no tomorrow will eventually understand that space exploration dreams come at a cost, and SpaceX shareholders will be paying that cost before seeing the colour of return.’
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