I invested $135 in SpaceX and checked my account 72 hours later — the result surprised me
Someone get Wall Street on the phone and insert the 'stonks' meme here because this humble journalist has just invested in SpaceX. Even if you tend to steer clear of the financial section of the newspaper (I know I do), you'll likely have heard about SpaceX's recent arrival on the stock market, with a record-breaking IPO targeting $75 billion. There was trepidation about SpaceX being overvalued, with many balking at the idea that Elon Musk's cosmos-exploring company could be worth anywhere near its proposed $1.78 trillion valuation.
Still, with Elon Musk being the world's richest man by quite some margin, and me having written enough articles about how your investment of X dollars in Tesla back in X would now be worth X, I thought, "Why not?"
With prices being locked into a set $135 per share, I booted up my Trading 212 app, placed a pre-order for a single share, and watched the money market like a hawk on June 12.
How easy was it to invest in SpaceX?
In family WhatsApp groups and from friends alike, many said I'd be a fool to invest in SpaceX due to estimations being more inflated than Mr. Musk's ego. Others suggested I should wait a while and potentially nab shares when the price inevitably tumbles. Then again, I remember writing about how a contractor persuaded Rob Gronkowski to invest $69,000 in Apple back in 2014, and how it soared to over $250,000 just two years later.
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It might be a Back to the Future cliche, but if I had a DeLorean, I'd love to go back to Apple's December 1980 IPO and nab a share for $22. After all, that $22 would now be worth a tasty $660,000, and no offense to my job, but I probably wouldn't be sitting writing this article. I'd also written about SpaceX cafeteria workers potentially becoming overnight millionaires and was quickly drawn in by the idea.
Trading 212 promotes itself as having no fees or commission on buying and selling shares, meaning my $135 instantly left my account and I soon found myself as the proud(ish) owner of a single SpaceX stock.
72 hours after investing in SpaceX...
Away from fears that SpaceX's actual valuation would be less than half of its $1.78 trillion, things actually went in the other direction.
Thanks to heavy trading and a first-day pop of nearly 20%, SpaceX landed a historic valuation of $2.1 trillion by market close. As I waited for my stock to plummet and my hard-earned $135 to be wiped out, I was surprised to see things hold steady. There was plenty of chatter on Trading 212 about its shares potentially crossing the $200 mark, with naysayers claiming this was impossible. At the time of writing, my little stock sits at $212.08. With a $77 climb, it's gone up 57.10% in the first three days. I can only kick myself for not investing more, but there are a few problems with that. Notably, I don't have the bank balance to funnel thousands of dollars into the stock market, nor would I be willing to gamble my savings. Still, compared to the interest you'd get in the bank, it's a win to see how things have panned out. The question is, will SpaceX continue to go up, or am I still riding high on the wave of launch hype?
The elephant in the room
I'd be amiss not to mention a Musk-shaped elephant in the room. I don't personally align with Elon Musk's views on many things, and I'm not particularly overjoyed by the idea that I've helped push him to trillionaire status. At the same time, how many times have you honestly worried that you're destroying the planet when saying please and thank you to ChatGPT? Also, if my stocks suddenly make me an overnight billionaire, I'll probably donate a sizeable sum to a pro-trans charity in support of Musk's estranged daughter, Vivian Wilson. I only recently started taking a punt on the stock market, and with my single share of SpaceX, I'm not exactly the biggest problem here. Maybe I'm a sellout, maybe I'm helping Elon Musk become a real-world Dr. Evil, maybe I protest him in other ways.
The future of finance
If you want to be accused of funding more billionaires, there's sure to be plenty of buzz about Anthropic and OpenAI's potential IPOs arriving before the end of the year. While you might think SpaceX's record-breaking arrival on the stock market has increased those chances, Polymarket claims these odds have dropped.
In terms of the rest of my little portfolio, mild success with Apple was largely wiped out by the recent WWDC and controversy surrounding Siri AI. A friend told me to invest in Rolls-Royce, which had been my most profitable until the war in Iran pumped the brakes on that one. With President Trump adamant the war is 'over', Rolls-Royce has finally started to climb again.
Elsewhere, my Paramount Skydance investment continues to scrape the barrel as I wait for the potential Warner Bros. Discovery buyout. Having only invested $47 in the first place, I'm not exactly losing sleep over this. In general, I'm hardly Mr. Monopoly in the stock stakes, but find it oddly addictive to check in on my little empire.
As for SpaceX, skeptics remind us that it has a jaw-dropping 115x revenue multiple and posted a net loss of $4.94 billion in 2025 on $18.7 billion in revenue. Elon Musk might have something of a Midas touch and be sitting pretty on his $1 trillion, but I don't think I'll be selling my house and putting it all in SpaceX stocks just yet.