SpaceX Soars in Trading Debut 6/12/26

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
Trading at Schwab is now powered by Ameritrade, bringing you an expanding library of education with even more ways to sharpen your trading skills. Access new online courses, insightful webcasts, articles, engaging videos and more. All curated just for traders. Plus, guided learning paths with content designed to fit your unique interests. And no sifting to find exactly what you need, so you can spend your time learning to trade brilliantly. Learn more at schwab.com/trading.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:27)
For a small business owner, every day is full of surprises. Some great, some not so great. Like when a client cancels their order at the last minute. But here's a surprise you will like. Progressive provides small business owners with 30 customizable coverage options to help keep their business going strong. So go ahead, surprise yourself. Get a quote in as little as 8 minutes at progressivecommercial.com. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates and third-party insurers. Coverage is not available in all states or for all vehicles and coverage selections.

**Kelly Evans** (0:57)
You're listening to The Exchange. Here's today's show.
A momentous day at the NASDAQ and at Starbase in Texas this morning, with the SpaceX team ringing the opening bell of the biggest IPO of all time. Welcome to The Exchange, I'm Kelly Evans. SpaceX shares, well, they're trading around $174 this hour, just under that. After pricing at 135 and opening at 150 just over an hour ago, the company now has a valuation of over $2 trillion.
That's more than Tesla, Meta, Eli Lilly, Walmart or JP Morgan. We've got every angle of this market milestone covered today. Seema Modi, Leslie Picker and Morgan Brennan are live at the NASDAQ and an all-star panel of tech and market experts will speak to shortly. Seema, let's begin with you, right in the middle of the action there.

**Seema Modi** (1:55)
Well, Kelly, SpaceX's first trade on the NASDAQ, it happened a lot sooner than the market was anticipating. The market makers here saw enough balance between buyers and sellers that they, along with the stabilization agents, felt it was ready to open at around 1145 a.m. Eastern. Get this, about $17 billion of SpaceX shares changed hands in the first five minutes of trade. The NASDAQ telling us now about 250 million shares have traded. That's about half of the size of the IPO with three hours left in trade. Guys, the vibe check here as you saw at the open, a lot of energy, a lot of enthusiasm, hundreds of SpaceX employees along with NASDAQ's executives convening around this IPO desk around me.
I met one SpaceX employee just in the last hour. He joined about seven years ago. His compensation was $150,000 with a lot of equity. Today, a big moment for him and his family.

**Kelly Evans** (2:48)
I read, what is there? A thousand or so millionaires as a result of where the company is being traded today, Sima?

**Seema Modi** (2:57)
Yeah, that's exactly right. It's one thing to read to Kelly, but to meet some of these individuals who work in finance, HR, IT engineers who never saw this day coming and were told in November of last year that now they are going to take SpaceX public and all that equity that they had sort of stored in the back would now become a realization and something that they could use. Now, I was told by that same individual who works in finance, who has a lot of equity that within two months, he'll be able to start selling and realize some of those gains.

**Kelly Evans** (3:26)
I mean, I was struck by the interview that Morgan did with the woman who basically runs the company and she said, yeah, she wasn't sure if they would ever go public. So here we are, they have and it's in public hands to a small extent now. Seema, thank you very much. Seema Modi, really appreciate it. Let's turn our attention over to Leslie Picker. She's at the NASDAQ now, but Leslie, you've had a busy morning to take a look at how this all came together.
And let's remind everybody, there was always the fear going into an IPO of this size that it might not hold the IPO price, probably not in Tesla's case, but it's always a risk. There was that concern about the retail participation. There was a lot of pressure on the teams behind the scenes to make sure this goes right. And questions still about to what extent they might be either supporting the trade or doing so in the days and weeks to come.

**Leslie Picker** (4:16)
It's kind of remarkable, Kelly, because so much about this process was new and different. We really didn't know how today would turn out. They went to market, they went on their roadshow. SpaceX did with $135 fixed price, which typically for any IPO, you'll see a range and you test the demand within that range. $135 per share, they told investors basically, you take it or you leave it. As we can see from the fact that they kept to that price in the final pricing last night and indicative of today's trading up about 29%, investors basically said, okay, yeah, we will do this at $135 per share. I was told in terms of the book, about 70% of it was long onlys and sovereign wealth funds.