Brian Carey: Cult of Elon Musk to propel SpaceX IPO into orbit

Cult of Elon Musk to propel SpaceX IPO into orbit

"There is a great line in Neil Jordan’s film adaptation of The Butcher Boy by Patrick McCabe, set in Clones, Co Monaghan, at the time of the Cuban missile crisis in 1962. A shop woman turns to her friend and declares: “It will be a bitter day for this town if the world comes to an end.”

It came to mind last week as concerns rose about soaring valuations in the technology sector. It would be a sad day for Irish pensions if there were an apocalypse in global capital markets.

The fret trigger was SpaceX, Elon Musk’s rockets to poisonous social media to chatbot group. It announced plans to raise up to $86 billion, at a valuation of up to $1.77 trillion, largely to fund its ambitions in artificial intelligence.

Anthropic, a rival in AI, recently raised $65 billion from private investors at a valuation of just under $1 trillion. OpenAI raised a record-breaking $122 billion in March, again privately, to achieve a valuation of $852 billion.

Meanwhile Alphabet, owner of Google and YouTube, last week also announced plans to raise $80 billion, for you know what, AI. Samsung backed the Anthropic fundraiser, Berkshire Hathaway is said to be committing $10 billion to the Alphabet whip-round, and Amazon, Nvidia and SoftBank rowed in behind OpenAI.

SpaceX, on the other hand, is reported to be reserving 25 to 30 per cent of its offering, or up to $25.5 billion of stock, for retail and private investors. A standard IPO allocation would be 5 to 10 per cent. Fidelity has reportedly lowered its account requirement for SpaceX IPO shares from $500,000 to $2,000. This looks like the shoeshine boy moment.

A further sign of small investor appetite was read into a rise in money flooding into investment fund Vanguard’s exchange-traded fund (ETF), with assets brimming over $1 trillion for the first time. Trillion, it seems, is the new billion.

ETFs are passive investment funds which track indices, such as the S&P 500, rather than actively select shares. They will not be buying stock in the IPO, but will need to mop up stock in what will become the seventh largest public company in the world after the flotation.

Also existing SpaceX investors, excluding Musk, will not be subject to the usual six month lock-in rules and will be allowed to sell a chunk of stock weeks after the IPO. Therefore there will be a wall of money waiting to prop up the SpaceX share price, with one pundit predicting that the share price could pop all the way to a $4 trillion valuation, based largely on post-IPO demand. "