“Robinhood saw record-breaking traffic today,” a company spokesperson said in an emailed statement. “As a result, some customers experienced latency and intermittent issues. Essential systems have recovered and our teams are closely monitoring.”
Robinhood was one of the five trading platforms to offer the sought-after SpaceX shares to retail customers, alongside Charles Schwab Corp., Fidelity Investments, SoFi Technologies Inc. and Morgan Stanley’s E*Trade. Other platforms didn’t see significant issues during the same period, according to Downdetector.
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SpaceX shares sold for $150 in opening trading on Nasdaq at 11:46 a.m. in New York, which was 11% above its $135 offering price.
While SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell, Chief Financial Officer Bret Johnsen and Musk’s mother Maye were among those gathered at Nasdaq MarketSite for the stock’s debut, Musk himself remained behind at the company’s headquarters in Starbase, Texas.
And many of his employees had other business to attend to: SpaceX launched 29 of its Starlink satellites into orbit on its Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral, Florida, about an hour before US stock markets opened.
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“It is certainly hard to believe that little company that started in a warehouse in El Segundo is now going public with the largest IPO ever,” Musk said in a livestream on X, the former Twitter that is now part of SpaceX. “And let me tell you if people had told me this was going to happen, I was like, man you must be smoking some really good crack, because I think this company is going to fail.”
The IPO of the rocket, satellite and artificial-intelligence company drew more than $350 billion in demand from institutions and retail investors, according to people familiar with the matter. About 70% of the shares sold to institutions were allocated to so-called long-only investors in addition to sovereign wealth funds, the people said.
BlackRock Inc. sought to buy about $5 billion in the IPO while Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund and Kuwait Investment Authority placed orders for shares worth $1 billion to $5 billion, Bloomberg News reported.
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(Edited by : Jomy Jos Pullokaran)
