SpaceX tops Amazon and Microsoft in market value as retail investors race to buy shares

SpaceX shares continued to soar in their third day of trading Tuesday, gaining another 15% as buyer interest in Elon Musk’s largest company showed no sign of slowing down.

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Ever since SpaceX shares began trading on the Nasdaq Friday afternoon, the company’s stock price has climbed more than 45% from $150 to more than $220, pushing its market value to $2.94 trillion.

The company debuted at a value of $1.77 trillion, and it has gained nearly $1 trillion in value since then.

SpaceX’s value now makes it the the world’s fourth largest publicly-traded company, leapfrogging both Amazon and Microsoft.

“There is only one stock retail [investors] care about right now,” wrote researchers at Vanda in a note to clients on Monday night.

“On a net basis, retail investors have now bought almost as much SPCX over the last two sessions as they bought across the entire US stock market last week,” they wrote, referring to the ticker symbol under which SpaceX trades.

On Tuesday morning, SpaceX announced that it had formally sealed a deal to acquire the AI coding firm Cursor in a deal that values the AI company at $60 billion.

SpaceX and Cursor had already agreed to the outline of a deal in April that gave SpaceX the option to acquire it, “or pay $10 billion for our work together.”

SpaceX shares could see even more volatility on Tuesday, when some financial exchanges are set to begin enabling trading in SpaceX options contracts, as those will contribute even more volume and trading activity.

Not all space stocks are benefitting from the SpaceX euphoria, however.

As soon as SpaceX began trading, “the rest of the space-stock space sold off hard as investors rotated into SPCX,” said analysts at Bespoke Investment Group on Tuesday.

Shares of Virgin Galactic, which trades under ‘SPCE,’ similar to SpaceX’s ‘SPCX,’ has faced steep selling in recent days. Other space-aligned stocks such as EchoStar and AST SpaceMobile also fell sharply after SpaceX’s debut.