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Shares of Elon Musk’s SpaceX are scraping by at record low levels this week, struggling to find any renewed enthusiasm from wary investors.
The stock is hovering just below $136, a hair above its original IPO price of $135, and well below its opening price of $150 on the day it went public last month. Shares are down almost nine percent over the last five days alone, and are just shy of 40 percent down compared to their all-time high of $225.
The slumping value of Musk’s rocket company has been a brutal wake-up call for some particularly daring investors, who went all in on what many have started to refer to as a “meme stock.” One Reddit user, who leveraged their own Roth IRA by making major calls on SpaceX, wiped out several hundred thousand dollars from their retirement.
The user made several SPCX calls at $160 and $145, decisions that ultimately came back to haunt them.
“So my Roth IRA is down 25 percent, I went and made a few options trades in Robinhood that also went the other way,” the user lamented in the infamous Wall Street Bets subreddit.
The warning signs of a steep market correction were all there. SpaceX went public with an astronomical, multitrillion dollar valuation despite losing billions of dollars a quarter, effectively guaranteeing major volatility. Even members of the Wall Street Bets community, which has a long history of advocating for aggressive trading strategies, were shaking their heads.
“No one could have seen this coming,” one user wrote facetiously.
“Crazy that people knew the insanely bloated valuation but still went long,” another added.
“Musk companies aren’t rational, Tesla has an insanely bloated valuation and is still way too high,” one user argued. “The only winning move is not to play.”
Analysts have long warned that investing in SpaceX is a bet on Musk himself. To make sense of its enormous valuation requires buying into his lofty vision of establishing AI data centers in space and constructing a city on Mars.
As Reuters puts it, SpaceX’s listing has turned into a “confidence test.” Now that shares have plunged below its IPO price, the scales could already be falling from investors’ eyes.
“It raises the narrative that the stock is up on fluff, on speculation, on froth, and not on real fundamentals,” Miller Tabak chief market strategist Matthew Maley told Reuters.
Anybody who bought in early “hoping to ‘make a killing’ will be disappointed,” Carnegie Investment Counsel director of research Greg Halter added.
More on SpaceX shares: SpaceX Stock Plunges to All-Time Low After Competitor Makes Major Leap
