Friday File: Boundless Space or Permanent Safety?

I’m on the road to my daughter’s college graduation today, so you’re getting your Friday File early.

The market was cheered going into the close yesterday, as President Trump again announced an imminent deal to end the war in Iran, so we’ll see what that hope turns into as today gets going and we head into another weekend, but there’s at least some relief that the threatened wave of “more bombing” might not be coming. For now.

And today, we’ll definitely see SpaceX (SPCX) begin trading, presumably somewhere in the neighborhood of a $2 trillion valuation, after reports of a nicely oversubscribed offering that closed yesterday, and we’ll see how the market absorbs the biggest one-day equity offering ever completed ($75 billion is what SPCX is actually raising, $1.75 trillion is the implied valuation of the whole company if it trades in the neighborhood of the offering price, both are records).

And it’s going to be very interesting to see how the stocks in the two hottest “themes” in the market — “AI infrastructure” and “Space” — perform once the biggest space company and one of the biggest AI companies is available to trade.   For at least the past six months, and really for longer than that, the publicly traded “pure play” space companies have almost uniformly been soaring higher, from Rocket Lab (RKLB, which is widely seen as “SpaceX, Jr.” when it comes to launch capacity), to smaller suppliers and telecom firms like like MDA Space (MDA), Redwire (RDW) and AST Spacemobile (ASTS), and the narrative has been that they’re rising because of growing interest in space commercialization, driven by SpaceX and its ambitious plans for “Orbital AI” satellite data centers… and, perhaps, by the fact that they can be “SpaceX stand-ins” for folks who couldn’t buy private shares of the launch leader.

So… what happens to the “stand-ins” and the “back door into SpaceX” companies when you can just buy and trade SpaceX itself?  Do they follow SPCX shares up or down?  Do they get compared to the market leader, once we’ve got analyst estimates for SPCX in a month or so?  Will traders just “take profits” now that the SpaceX IPO “catalyst” event has come and gone, and move on to other themes or sectors?

I don’t know, but some of these companies might face real challenges in competing with SpaceX in the future, particularly because they …