- I was at the Nasdaq building when SpaceX went live on Friday morning.
- The record-breaking IPO brought together Musk fans, tourists, and some poised to win big.
- Here’s everything I saw in a sweltering Times Square during the historic event.
As for the vibe near the Nasdaq, Gilles wasn’t all that impressed.
“It’s not that interesting, to be honest,” he told me.
The crowd was full of Musk fans and confused tourists.
In typical New York fashion, I was surrounded by a chorus of languages, as tourists visiting for the World Cup mingled with die-hard Musk fans.
A reporter from Soon, a media company, wore a full astronaut costume and carried a binder with SpaceX’s lengthy S1 filing. He told me it cost him $174 to print at FedEx, and would’ve cost $300 if he hadn’t printed the color pages at home.
The opening bell brought some cheers.
Light cheers and claps erupted when the bell rang, as many in the crowd craned to see the TV monitors playing the scene from inside the building. The crowd thinned out afterward, and photographers started stepping down from their folding stools.
There were some skeptics.
Though the crowd was generally pretty bullish on SpaceX, Bryan Winter, an architect who stopped by on his way to work, said that this is “just another bubble.” We were, he said, watching “cult behavior.”
Winter, who said he planned to buy some shares nonetheless, told me it wasn’t his first time at an historic New York finance moment. He said he’d brought his then eight-year-old son to the Lehman Brothers building on September 14, 2008, the day before the investment banking giant collapsed.
Two 24-year-olds who said they were traders told me they don’t plan to buy any stock, since it’s volatile. They walked the 20 blocks from their office to check out the scene.
SpaceX employees seemed to dot the crowd.
Some in the crowd appeared to be SpaceX employees, though they declined to identify themselves that way. A number of young men wore Starlink shirts; a few donned “Occupy Mars” tees. A number of people who looked like twenty-somethings, congratulating each other and cheering when Starlink imagery came on the monitors, told me they couldn’t talk because of their jobs.
One guy, who showed me photos of himself at SpaceX facilities and an old email address, said he left the company about a year ago. He’d loved the work, but the environment was intense, and he needed to start a new chapter. Like many current and former employees, he said he has equity in the company and is excited about this liquidity event, to put it mildly. For now, he plans to keep most of his shares, since he believes in SpaceX’s mission.
Some hopefuls stuck around to try and see execs
Trading hadn’t started yet by 10:45 am, but some of the devoted still stuck around to try and snap shots of execs when they left the Nasdaq building. A police officer told me he didn’t understand why everyone was waiting around in the heat, since nobody was coming outside.
As I was turning to leave, I told the photographer I was with that Musk had actually been in Texas that morning. A guy turned around, shocked. Why had he spent the past 20 minutes hovering near the building entrance?
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