SpaceX Blew Past Amazon in 4 Days — Why You Couldn't Buy the IPO, and the Trap in Chasing SPCX Now

$135. That was the price four days ago. This morning it's about $212 — a 57% jump in four trading sessions, and somewhere in that climb SpaceX quietly became worth more than Amazon. If you sit in India and tried to grab a slice of the most-hyped IPO in history, you already know the punchline: you couldn't. Here's what actually happened, how you can buy SPCX today, and the part nobody staring at the chart wants to hear.

From $135 to a $2.8 trillion rocket in four days

SpaceX listed on the Nasdaq as SPCX on June 12, pricing its IPO at $135 a share and raising about $75 billion — the biggest IPO ever floated. Demand was absurd: more than $250 billion in orders chased a $75 billion deal. Day one, the stock popped nearly 20% and closed around $161, pushing the company past $2 trillion on its first afternoon as a public name.

It didn't stop. By June 16 the stock was near $212, up about 57% from the IPO, valuing SpaceX at roughly $2.8 trillion. That number is big enough to leapfrog Amazon (about $2.66 trillion) and slot in as one of the five most valuable companies on Earth — above Tesla, the other Musk rocket.

Here's the quiet truth underneath the fireworks: the people who actually got rich on SpaceX held it before June 12. A December 2025 employee tender priced shares near $421 (pre-split), and a 5-for-1 split in May reset the math. Engineers and early backers are the ones cashing a once-in-a-career windfall. Someone buying at $212 today is making a very different bet.

Why you couldn't buy the IPO — and how to buy SPCX now

A US IPO doesn't reach you through ASBA, UPI or your NSE/BSE demat. Those shares are carved up for US institutions and US retail first; an Indian resident has no on-ramp into the allocation itself. That's not a glitch — it's just how cross-border listings work.

Once it's listed, though, SPCX is just another Nasdaq ticker. Indian residents can buy it on the secondary market under the RBI's Liberalised Remittance Scheme (LRS) through platforms like INDmoney, Vested or Groww Global — the same way you'd buy Apple or Nvidia.

The catch most first-timers miss: it costs more than the share price. LRS lets you send up to $250,000 a year abroad. But on money you remit above ₹10 lakh in a financial year, your bank collects 20% TCS upfront. You do get it back — it's adjusted against your tax or refunded when you file your ITR — but it parks a fifth of your money with the government for months. And any gains you make on US stocks are taxable back home in India, with US dividends docked 25% at source.

What this means for your money

Strip away the rocket and what's the business? Mostly Starlink — $11.4 billion of that $18.7 billion in revenue, growing around 50% a year, with 10 million-plus subscribers. That's real, and genuinely impressive. It is not, yet, $2.8-trillion real. The gap between those two facts is the entire risk you're taking on at $212.

So my honest read: the product being sold this week isn't SpaceX. It's FOMO. A stock that's up 57% in four days isn't a plan — it's a headline, and headlines are exactly where retail investors tend to buy the top.

Here's the math that should make you exhale. You don't need SpaceX to build real wealth. ₹10,000 a month into a plain index SIP at a ~12% long-run return becomes about ₹1 crore in roughly 21 years — automatic, no $212 entry price, no 20% TCS lockup, no betting your savings on a single rocket. The unglamorous path is the one that actually compounds.

If you still want a piece, size it like a lottery ticket: a small slice you can afford to lose, funded by money that isn't your emergency cushion — and buy it because you believe in ten years of Starlink and Starship cash flow, not because the line went vertical this week.

Want to see the boring path in real numbers? Run your own SIP and watch it compound. And if you're weighing US exposure as part of a bigger money picture, compare what your money is really worth in India vs the US.