THE NEW YORK TIMES: Wall Street goes gaga for Elon Musk’s SpaceX in the countdown to world’s biggest IPO

At Goldman Sachs’ Manhattan headquarters, rocket ships have taken over the lobby.

Not to be outdone, Bank of America is planning to light up the spire atop its midtown offices to resemble a rocket taking off.

A few blocks away, JPMorgan Chase will host a SpaceX sales pitch to thousands of clients at its Park Avenue headquarters. It will broadcast to 90 bank branches and offices across 26 states, some of which will close early for the event. The bank’s CEO, Jamie Dimon, will be there to sell the deal to the crowd himself.

There has never been a larger initial public offering than that of SpaceX, Elon Musk’s rocket maker and artificial intelligence company, and people involved in the sales effort who were not allowed to speak publicly said Wall Street’s efforts to sell the IPO had been just as extraordinary.

SpaceX’s IPO, expected next week, is a high-stakes assignment for the 23 banks and brokerage firms that Mr Musk has hired to sell shares to investors. The bankers are selling the deal to every possible corner of the investment world, from giant asset managers like BlackRock to individual buyers on Reddit.

At stake are the more than $US500 million in fees that the banks will collect for their work on SpaceX.

But the banks also need to ensure Mr Musk’s deal is an unequivocal success to boost confidence in two other mega-offerings of public stock expected in the coming months: OpenAI and Anthropic.

On Wednesday (local time), SpaceX set the price for its IPO at $US135 ($189) a share, which would value the company at $US1.77 trillion and make it the largest public offering ever.

At that price, SpaceX would raise $US74.4 billion from the offering, and its valuation would be more than 40 per cent higher than the $US1.25 trillion that it valued itself at in February. (The current IPO record is held by Saudi Aramco, Saudi Arabia’s state-owned oil company, which was valued at $US1.7 trillion and raised more than $US29 billion when it went public in 2019.)

“Even if they were giving away gold bricks” the sales effort would be “massive,” given the amounts SpaceX is looking to raise, said Edward Best, a partner in capital markets at the law firm Willkie Farr & Gallagher.

SpaceX did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The preparation has been brewing for weeks. SpaceX’s bankers have already had a number of “testing the waters” conversations with potential major investors. Such conversations are not atypical, but the size of the multibillion-dollar checks being discussed are.

Unlike a traditional roadshow in which companies crisscross the country to pitch investors, SpaceX is planning more discreet settings for its largest potential investors. In the coming days, bankers at Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs will invite investors to their Manhattan offices to privately sell them on the deal, three people familiar with the plans said.

It’s unclear whether Mr Musk will attend any of these meetings, but he will nonetheless be the star attraction. Part of the pitch is his stature as a once-in-a-lifetime visionary and his company, which envisions the potential colonisation of Mars, as a multi-generational deal.

The bankers are projecting a take-it-or-leave-it attitude to investors. Instead of going through a lengthy back-and-forth to set a range of prices for the IPO, the banks landed on $US135 a share, which investors either have to accept or sit out.

SpaceX also decided to forgo disclosing historical quarterly earnings in its IPO registration documents, as companies traditionally do.

“For a fast-growing company, you would typically expect to see the quarterly breakdown,” said Matt Kennedy, a senior IPO market strategist at Renaissance Capital.

He added that the lack of extensive quarterly numbers indicated that the company’s view should largely be considered through longer-term lenses.

Everyday investors are expected to play an inordinately large role in the offering, making up some 30 per cent of the buyers. That reflects both Mr Musk’s fan base among day traders and other individual investors and the large amount of money SpaceX is looking to raise.

Fidelity said Thursday that it would facilitate purchases in SpaceX’s IPO for customers with at least $US2000 in a retail brokerage account, less than it usually requires for public offerings.

On Wednesday, Fidelity hosted a webinar for its legions of 401(k) and other customers about how to “get in early” on an IPO.

While these sorts of events may help build enthusiasm, most of the individual buyers are likely to be very wealthy investors who can afford a significant number of shares at $US135 apiece, Mr Best said.

SpaceX has already hosted some prospective high-net-worth investors on field trips to its campus in Hawthorne, California, to show off the technology it uses to design and assemble rockets.

The banks are doing what they can to ensure that they corral as many of these investors as possible. About 100 of Bank of America’s financial advisers recently squeezed into a room at the bank’s headquarters for a training on how to sell SpaceX IPO shares to their high-net-worth clients.

Mr Dimon will be joined for his pitch on Thursday by Mary C. Erdoes, the head of his bank’s asset and wealth management unit. SpaceX’s president and chief operating officer, Gwynne Shotwell, and its chief financial officer, Bret Johnsen, are also expected to address the crowd. They may even walk by the sculpture of a Promethean spire by artist Dustin Yellin sitting in the lobby.

Ms Shotwell and Mr Johnsen will have a busy day regaling investors. Also on Thursday, they are set to speak at the Bank of America headquarters to some 5000 clients.

Bank of America is calling its gatherings “launch parties”.

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