SpaceX went public. The stock dropped. Retail traders who bought the hype are now discovering that orbital mechanics and market mechanics have one thing in common: gravity always wins.
Elon Musk launched an intergalactic IPO. Those words should have been the first warning sign. The second warning sign was retail traders thinking they understood rocket science better than portfolio management. They were wrong about both.
Wall Street analysts are underwater too, which brings me genuine joy. Professional money managers with Bloomberg terminals and three monitors spent weeks building discounted cash flow models for a company that explodes rockets on purpose. They called it innovation. The market called it overpriced.
The bears are feasting. They watched retail pile into SpaceX at the top, armed with nothing but Robinhood accounts and a half-remembered Joe Rogan podcast. Now those same retail traders are holding bags so heavy they'd cost extra to launch into orbit.
SpaceX bulls keep pointing to future Mars colonization as justification for the valuation. Cool. Your investment thesis depends on humans successfully terraform ing another planet. Meanwhile you can't successfully navigate a brokerage app without buying at all-time highs.
The headline says retail and Wall Street aren't going down without a fight. That's adorable. They're not fighting. They're drowning in slow motion while posting rocket emojis and telling themselves this is just a healthy consolidation. It's not a consolidation. It's a repricing.
Musk promised the stars. Investors got a red portfolio and a lesson in what happens when you confuse a CEO's Twitter feed with actual financial analysis. The lesson cost them thousands of dollars per share, which seems expensive for information that was already free.
But sure, keep holding. Mars needs someone to pay for the trip, and it might as well be you.
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