South African institutional investors were cautiously positive about the mammoth SpaceX listing on Friday, but retail investors piled in as if it were not so much an IPO as a once-in-a-generation boarding call for Mars.
According to EasyEquities CEO Charles Savage, demand from South African retail investors for Elon Musk’s newly listed space, satellite and AI group was unlike anything the platform had seen before.
“It was extraordinary, to be honest,” Savage tells Currency. “The most-traded stock in a week will be something like R10m – that would be a big week for a stock. SpaceX did more than R100m. It was $7m on day one. That’s insane.”
The scale of demand dwarfed EasyEquities’ previous IPO record, the Boxer listing, which attracted about R60m through the platform. SpaceX attracted almost twice that on its first day – and, Savage adds, with many investors still sitting on their hands waiting for a pullback before buying.
SpaceX priced its shares at $135 in the largest IPO in history, raising $75bn and valuing the company at $1.77-trillion. The shares opened at $150 and closed at $160.95, putting the market capitalisation at more than $2.1-trillion and immediately placing it among the world’s most valuable listed companies.
From rockets and AI to broadband and Mars
The company, trading under the ticker SPCX on the Nasdaq, brings together Musk’s space launch business, Starlink satellite communications and, controversially for some investors, xAI. That combination has made SpaceX not just a space stock, but an everything stock: rockets, broadband, AI, defence, data centres, Mars, Musk, mythology and, for many retail investors, a chance to buy into the future with a few taps on a phone.
Savage explains that South African demand was driven by EasyEquities’ younger and strongly tech-oriented investor base. “Our clients are very tech-biased, because the demographic age is young, and they’re looking for growth opportunities. Tech is where growth has been. It’s not necessarily that they’re tech-biased; it’s just that that is where the growth is, and they’re smart, so they’ve worked it out.”
But SpaceX was different, Savage says, because it came with a narrative few companies could match. “This is the first time we can all invest meaningfully in space and the future and Elon Musk,” he adds. “Those three themes coming together are possibly what’s driving this extraordinary demand.”
The listing took place against a backdrop of intense global debate about whether SpaceX represented a new class of strategic technology company or the clearest sign yet that investors had entered a late-cycle frenzy. The company’s 2025 financials showed revenue of $18.7bn but also a net loss of $4.9bn, largely due to the capital demands of xAI, which incurred more than $6bn in operating losses despite generating $3.2bn in revenue. Without xAI, the legacy SpaceX businesses – Starlink and the rocket-launch segment – were profitable. Critics pointed out that even after the listing bounce, investors were paying an eye-watering multiple of sales for a company whose most speculative businesses still have much to prove.
Savage doesn’t dismiss those concerns. Many sophisticated investors he had spoken to believed the stock was expensive, yet expected it to be worth far more in a decade. “Yes, it might be overvalued,” he says, “but there’s a 10x opportunity in the stock over a decade. There are not many of those out there. It is a generational stock that’s going to give you probably 10 times the return over the next decade.”
Savage also rejects the idea that professionals shunned the deal. Reuters reported before the listing that BlackRock had sought to buy at least $5bn worth of shares. “It can’t be true [that this is just a retail story],” Savage says. “There isn’t this much money sitting, waiting in retail hands. Retail has got a disproportionate amount, but the pros were all in. BlackRock was in. Andreessen [Horowitz, a private-equity firm] was in. All of the pros are in this.”
Even more people were just watching
For EasyEquities, the trading surge produced some strain but no major failure. Savage says there were about 10 minutes of pricing issues around 7pm South African time, which led the platform to briefly suspend trading – but no-one lost money, and Robinhood had experienced similar issues.
EasyEquities had expected about R100m of volume; the final number was about 15%-20% above that. With an hour of trading left on Friday, the platform had close to 20,000 buyers – more than 10% of its US-investing client base. Even more striking was the number of people simply watching. “We were serving well over 150,000-200,000 investors who were just sitting and watching the IPO,” Savage says. “It was definitely the most-watched IPO we’ve ever seen.”
South African retail investors could not participate in the book build, meaning they could buy only after the stock began trading. No South African broker had access to the allocation process, highlighting a broader problem: major listings increasingly attract global investor demand, yet IPO allocations remain largely domestic and institutionally controlled.
“The world is becoming more global, and the ability for foreign investors to participate in IPOs is building,” he says. “Someone will probably solve that problem at some point. There’s only so much capital in America to service these listings.” Tokenised stock markets may eventually become part of that solution.
The pricing of SpaceX, he says, was almost impossible to explain using conventional valuation methods. “Any normal valuation process, with a stretch of the imagination, would have got it to $1-trillion. Beyond that, you’re taking a leap of faith that is unimaginable. You’re betting on a future that doesn’t exist – that exists only in Elon’s mind.” And Musk, in Savage’s view, was precisely why the premium existed at all. “If it wasn’t Elon Musk, what would we have paid? The truth is, we would have paid less than $1-trillion. The valuation can only be underpinned by people believing in a future that only Elon Musk can describe.”
How much cash is left for the others?
The listing may also have reshaped expectations for the next wave of mega-IPOs. “I do wonder how much liquidity this has sucked out of the room,” Savage adds. “Liquidity is a scarce resource in that size, and OpenAI and Anthropic are moving fast to make sure they’re not third. One of them needs to be second.”
The arrival of SpaceX as a publicly traded company also weighed on other listed space stocks. “The proxy stocks benefited from the lack of SpaceX,” says Savage. “People wanted to invest in the narrative, but there was no listed access, so they bought the alternative. But they’re not SpaceX. You can’t even say them in the same breath.”
He describes Starlink and SpaceX as “extraordinary businesses”, but the inclusion of xAI complicated the story. “I just wish it were Starlink and SpaceX. I think xAI muddies the water. But I wouldn’t bet against Elon.”
For Savage, who bought a small holding for himself, the appeal was not only financial. “There are two returns from investing,” he says. “The obvious one is the economic return. But the thing they don’t value, and for me it’s the bigger of the two, is: what’s the ride worth? What’s being along, observing it, learning from it, asking questions of it, worth? I bought enough to keep me interested and engaged. I’m along for the ride, and I’m a proud SpaceX shareholder. What happens with the price is so secondary to me. For the next decade, I’m going to be along for that ride and learn from every move.”
The SpaceX listing may be judged in time by discounted cash flows, satellite margins, launch costs, AI capex and whether Starship – its reusable rocket that promises to make space travel cheap, routine and eventually head to Mars – delivers on exactly that. But on Friday, for many South African retail investors, the calculation was simpler: the future was finally listed, and they wanted a seat, even if it was economy class.
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Top image collage: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images (Elon Musk photograph); Currency.
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