Tesla stock fell 4% on Wednesday to $381.59, with shares heading toward a second straight week in the red as attention shifted to SpaceX’s looming IPO. Investor Gary Black said many retail buyers of SPCX may be selling TSLA to help pay for those new shares.
The move came as SpaceX’s offering drew more than $250 billion in demand, or more than four times the stock available, in what is shaping up to be the biggest IPO ever. SpaceX is offering 555.6 million shares at $135 each and is seeking to raise $75 billion at a valuation of about $1.8 trillion, a price tag that has made the deal one of the hottest trades in the market this week.
Black, who has followed Tesla closely, said he expects lead bankers Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley to engineer a Day 1 pop for IPO buyers even as he continues to view SPCX as richly priced. He said the company is trading at about 300 times his estimate of 2025 EBITDA and around 120 times projected 2026 EBITDA of $15 billion, and he said he would wait for the stock to come back to earth after the debut before buying.
That kind of caution sits alongside the frenzy around the offering. SpaceX’s expected debut on Friday is already reshaping how some investors think about Elon Musk’s two most valuable companies, especially after Tesla stock was mentioned 87 times in SpaceX’s latest S-1 filing and Tesla itself holds 19 million SpaceX shares. The overlap has revived talk of a possible combination that once sounded far-fetched but has moved closer to the mainstream in recent months.
For Tesla shareholders, the immediate question is not whether SpaceX can get away with a strong first day. It is how much of Wednesday’s selling came from investors moving money from one Musk-linked name to another. Tesla’s own slide has also been tied to broader weakness in long-duration tech stocks as interest rates stay higher for longer, but the rush into SPCX has added a sharper, more specific pressure point. For readers tracking the move, the same trade also ties back to a separate Tesla Stock Price Watch as Roadster Demo Slips to August or Later.
When SpaceX starts trading on Friday, that answer will still matter. If the IPO opens hot and holds, the transfer of money out of TSLA could continue; if the stock cools quickly, some of the selling pressure on Tesla may fade just as fast.
