SpaceX shares jumps 11% to about $148, putting the stock 10% above its IPO price

SpaceX (NASDAQ: SPCX) shares had a big Wednesday, jumping 11% and ending the session at around $148. That puts the stock well above where it started trading after its IPO.

SpaceX is now sitting roughly 10% higher than its $135 IPO price and about 41% above the low it hit on Aug. 3. The stock has also climbed close to 28% in just the past week.

The rally happened even after Daiwa Capital Markets became more cautious about how much the company should be worth. Daiwa cut its SpaceX price target from $175 to $140, while leaving its rating at neutral.

That new target was only about 0.9% above SpaceX’s Aug. 10 closing price of $138.74. Daiwa said the lower valuation came down to how much cash SpaceX still needs to spend as it grows. Faster growth may bring in more revenue, but running and expanding the business also requires a lot more capital.

Short sellers pull back as SpaceX recovers from its earnings sell-off

The short trade against SpaceX has changed very quickly. S3 Partners estimated that short interest had dropped to about 11% of the SpaceX shares available for public trading by Wednesday. Just last week, short interest had climbed as high as 34%.

Much of that was because of the traders realizing it was time to cover their short positions, now that the stock began to bounce back. In addition, more shares of SpaceX became tradable as a result of the first big lockup expiration of the company.

This helped to increase the public float, and hence the short interest became a small portion of the total tradable stock.

Ihor Dusaniwsky, managing director of predictive analytics at S3 Partners, said traders who wanted to keep betting against the stock were starting to run out of room to keep adding money to those positions.

“Shorts that wanted to short are out of bullets,” Ihor said. “Only so much money you can put into a trade.”

SpaceX’s rebound has also carried the stock back above the price where investors first bought shares during the IPO. With the stock near $148, it was trading about $13 higher than the $135 IPO price.

Norway’s wealth fund buys SpaceX while holding much bigger Nvidia, Apple and Tesla stakes

There was also fresh news out of Norway. Norges Bank Investment Management, better known as NBIM, disclosed that it owns around 0.05% of SpaceX. That stake was worth a little more than $1.2 billion in the fund’s first-half report.

NBIM disclosed the SpaceX investment on the same day it posted a record first-half profit of more than $184 billion. During the first six months of the year, the fund made more than 1.75 trillion Norwegian kroner, which works out to about $184.9 billion.

The fund returned 9.4% during that period, with Asian technology stocks helping lift performance.

“The result is driven by good returns in the equity market, particularly from Asian technology stocks,” Nicolai Tangen, CEO of NBIM, said.

Norway created the fund back in the 1990s to invest money coming from the country’s oil and gas business. Today, it is worth around $2.34 trillion and owns investments in more than 7,000 companies across over 50 countries. Altogether, the fund owns roughly 1.5% of the world’s publicly listed shares.

NBIM already had another large investment tied to Elon Musk through Tesla (NASDAQ: TSLA), the company it owns about 1% of, reportedly worth roughly $15.7 billion.

That has not stopped the relationship between Elon and the fund from getting tense over the years.

Back in 2024, NBIM voted against Elon’s $56 billion Tesla compensation package. Nicolai later invited Elon to a private dinner and to an NBIM conference in Oslo, but Elon turned down the invitation.

Their private messages later became public under Norway’s freedom of information law.

NBIM took the same position again at Tesla’s annual shareholder meeting in late 2025, when it voted against another compensation package for Elon that could have been worth as much as $1 trillion.

“While we appreciate the significant value created under Mr. Musk’s visionary role, we are concerned about the total size of the award, dilution, and lack of mitigation of key person risk- consistent with our views on executive compensation,” NBIM said at the time.

“We will continue to seek constructive dialogue with Tesla on this and other topics,” they added.

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