The day he heard SpaceX was going public, Kevin Conlon knew he wanted to buy into what he believed could be a transformative company focused on space and technology.
On Friday, the company’s first day of trading, Mr. Conlon, 70, placed three orders to purchase about $10,000 worth of its shares.
“I know the dude’s a little crazy,’’ Mr. Conlon said of SpaceX’s chief executive, Elon Musk. “But people like Howard Hughes were crazy.”
Mr. Conlon, who lives in Northern California, is among the legions of individual investors who helped drive SpaceX’s stock to dizzying heights during its first few days as a public company. Its shares are now over 40 percent higher than their initial public offering price. SpaceX briefly became one of the five most valuable companies on Tuesday, leapfrogging Amazon and coming close to topping Microsoft.
On Wednesday, the company’s stock fell for the first time, dropping 5 percent, amid a broader market sell-off driven by expectations of higher interest rates.
Since Friday, SpaceX has been the most bought stock by retail investors each day, according to data from Vanda Research, a company that specializes in tracking retail trading.
After subtracting sellers from buyers, retail investors have bought a net $370 million of SpaceX since Friday, with Tuesday standing out as the biggest day of buying at $146 million, according to Vanda. That’s more than the net retail buying of Nvidia, Microsoft, Alphabet, Meta and Amazon combined over the same period.
“We’re running out of superlatives to describe retail enthusiasm for SpaceX,” the analysts at Vanda said in a research note.
SpaceX’s blockbuster trading debut is the latest example of how retail investors have become a force in financial markets in recent years.
Their influence rose during the coronavirus pandemic, when many people stuck at home started to become interested in trading. Meme stocks like AMC Entertainment and GameStop, two struggling companies that had their fortunes transformed by individuals buying up their beaten-down shares en masse, showed the market power of retail investors.
They often make investments of only a few thousand dollars at a time, but taken collectively, they can move a stock and even the broader market.
Retail investors have been big supporters of Mr. Musk’s other businesses, like Tesla. The newly minted trillionaire had promised that they would be more involved in the SpaceX I.P.O., which valued the company at $1.77 trillion, than was typical.
SpaceX allocated more than 20 percent of its shares to retail investors. The usual amount is around 5 percent.
When the stock became available on Tuesday for options trading — derivatives that allow investors to bet on a company’s value rising or falling without owning the stock itself — SpaceX broke further records, according to data from Cboe Global Markets. It became the most heavily traded new listing ever, surpassing Meta’s debut on options markets in 2012.
Jake Taylor, head of U.S. single stock options at Optiver, described the trading activity as “overwhelmingly bullish.”
At first, Loren Svetvilas, 57, didn’t tell anyone he had bought SpaceX stock last week. He said he was not a fan of Mr. Musk, but he couldn’t resist buying into the space company.
Mr. Svetvilas pays a financial planner to manage most of his investments but keeps a small pool of money to play around with.
He said he had received 11 of the 18 shares he had requested at the I.P.O. and planned to wait until his money had doubled before selling it.
Already, his shares are up over 50 percent.
“It’s not like I’m proud of it,” Mr. Svetvilas said. “But it’s doing well.”
The analysts at Vanda Research noted that while individual investors’ involvement in SpaceX had similarities to the rapidly appreciating stock valuations of the meme stock craze, the company was more akin to other tech behemoths that also attracted big retail bets. These companies are perceived as the vanguard of a future economy.
“Together, these companies sit at the forefront of A.I. and technology, and are increasingly viewed by investors as the businesses most likely to shape the next decade,” the analysts said.
They suggested expanding the so-called Magnificent Seven stocks — Nvidia, Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, Tesla, Apple and Meta — to include SpaceX, as well as Anthropic and OpenAI, two large artificial intelligence companies that are planning public listings this year. The analysts proposed the moniker of “The Fab 10” for this expanded group.
Mr. Conlon, the retail investor in Northern California, is not interested in SpaceX — or Anthropic, when it goes public — as a fad or a meme. He is more focused on the long term, such as SpaceX’s commitment to put data centers in space and the increasing dominance of artificial intelligence across the economy.
“I believe they’re both inevitable,” he said.
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