SpaceX’s blockbuster IPO earlier this month made Elon Musk, who was already the wealthiest person in the world by net value, unfathomably rich.
After shares rallied to a peak of $225 on June 16, a stunning 50 percent rise over their opening price, Musk officially became the world’s very-first trillionaire — an obscene hyper-capitalist milestone highlighting the tech oligarchy’s iron grip on society.
But once the hype died down in the days following its IPO, SpaceX’s stock started falling last week. The downturn accelerated by Monday, when the company experienced its most bruising single day of trading yet, wiping out hundreds of billions in market capitalization.
Now that shares are hovering just above the company’s opening price, struggling to clear even the mid $150s by midday Wednesday, Musk’s net value has once again shrunk to a still-obscene $957 billion, according to Bloomberg‘s Billionaires Index, robbing him of his new honorific.
Making matters worse, shares of his EV maker Tesla haven’t been immune to a global tech sell-off, slipping five percent over the last five days.
However, as Quartz points out, SpaceX still accounts for almost 80 percent of his net worth, a position in the stock valued at $744 billion, meaning the rocket company’s fate is very much tied to his.
Given major fluctuations over the last two weeks, SpaceX investors are still racing to make sense of the company’s enormous valuation, especially given its shaky business fundamentals and unproven plans to establish a constellation of orbital data centers.
What analysts keep pointing out is that retail investors aren’t really vouching for the company’s performance — they’re basically just betting on Musk himself, and his grandiose vision for the future.
Waiting in the wings are short sellers — long a thorn in Musk’s side — who have been increasing their bets against the company in the wake of recent drops in share price, as Reuters reports.
“Short interest in SpaceX is building remarkably fast for a stock that has only been public a couple of weeks,” Ortex co-founder Peter Hillerberg told the news agency, pointing out that the recent share price wipeout is a “clear sign that a growing number of traders are positioning for the price to fall sharply.”
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