On June 12, SpaceX started trading publicly. By the end of its third day on the market, retail investors had bought more shares of the rocket company than they had of Apple, Amazon, Nvidia, Microsoft, Alphabet, Meta, and Tesla combined.
That’s not a typo. One company, three days old on public markets, outpaced the entire Magnificent Seven in retail net buying. According to Vanda Research, SpaceX absorbed roughly $117 million in retail purchases on its debut day alone, accounting for 56% of all single-stock retail equity purchases across the entire US market that session.
The numbers behind the frenzy
SpaceX priced its IPO at $135 per share on June 11, giving the company an estimated valuation of $1.75 trillion before a single public trade was executed.
Shares surged to around $193 in the sessions following the debut, a 43% gain from the IPO price.
One structural factor helped fuel the retail wave: SpaceX allocated approximately 30% of its total IPO shares to retail investors. The typical IPO reserves somewhere between 5% and 10% for non-institutional buyers.
What happened to the Magnificent Seven?
The shift has prompted some analysts to reconsider whether the Magnificent Seven framework still captures where investor attention is actually going. One emerging concept is the “FAB 10,” a proposed expansion that could include SpaceX alongside other frontier technology companies like OpenAI and Anthropic.
What this means for investors
The 30% retail allocation gave individual investors unprecedented access to a mega-cap IPO. But it also means a larger-than-usual share of the float is held by investors who are statistically more likely to sell on short-term momentum shifts.
The crypto angle is worth noting. Several crypto platforms had been offering tokenized versions of SpaceX shares during the company’s pre-IPO era. Those tokenized products were reportedly canceled in conjunction with the actual IPO launch.