Tens of thousands of Australians have bid for shares in SpaceX, Elon’s Musk’s AI and rocket company that plans to create data centres in space and colonise Mars, which hits Wall Street tonight.

Retail investors in Australia could apply for shares via a CommSec account. And 30,000 different accounts bid for stock.

There have been bigger retail IPOs in Australia, but that’s only because people were effectively subsidised into companies like Telstra and Commonwealth Bank when they privatised.

In terms of retail investors taking up an IPO, there hasn’t been one this size in many years. And on top of that, this is a local retail offering of a US company, which is unprecedented.

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Greed-o-meter

Fear & Greed Q+A today

On why a Singapore investment company has backed Brisbane as a major life sciences hub: 

 

"If you then turn around and say, okay, where across Asia do I actually want to base myself? I want to base myself somewhere that's got proximity, and within an eight-hour flight of Brisbane you can get to nearly half the world's population in a single sector. That's incredibly important.

 

You want to be somewhere that has relatively strong civic infrastructure, rule of law, all of the government protections around IP and so forth, and a highly talented, mobile, flexible workforce.

 

Brisbane actually ticks all of those boxes. You've got the largest healthcare precinct in the Southern Hemisphere at Herston, where you've got public and private hospitals, research institutes and universities all co-located in one place. And you can do that within 12 or 15 minutes of a global export hub at Brisbane Airport and the ports precinct."

 

Fear & Greed is working with the Brisbane Economic Development Agency to explore why businesses are increasingly choosing Brisbane.

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News in brief

Federal treasurer Jim Chalmers yesterday told an investor conference that changes to capital gains tax and negative gearing will be “good for productivity” because they will shift investors away from established homes and into other more productive activities.

Super Retail, owner of Supercheap Auto, Rebel, BCF and Macpac, yesterday outlined a five-year strategy to increase its number of stores from 790 to more than 900.

Australia will buy jet fuel and fertiliser from China, as the war in the Middle East continues with conflict escalating in recent days.

The US military has launched strikes against “multiple” targets in Iran for the second straight day after President Donald Trump accused the country of dragging out talks on an interim peace deal.

Football’s World Cup kicked off this morning in North America, and it is already the largest betting market in the US ever, apart from the last Presidential election, and there’s still five weeks to go.

Fear-o-meter

It isn’t clear whether Australian retail investors are buying into SpaceX because they believe in Elon Musk and think they can make some money, or whether they just want to say they were their when SpaceX achieved lift-off on Wall Street.

The fact that a bunch of Aussie brokers said there was lots of interest though individual parcels were small, suggests it might be more of the latter.

Away from the big vision, SpaceX will make money by launching satellites and things into space at a cost of $3,000 a kilogram, whereas a few years back it was $12,000 a kilogram. In the future, it might be as little as $200 a kilo.

At that rate, SpaceX will not just win business putting satellites into space and undertaking security missions for countries, but it will also create new use cases. That might be, for instance, data centres in space.

It isn’t just Australians wanting to buy into SpaceX. Bloomberg is reporting that the IPO has attracted demand for more than four times the available shares. The company is offering 555.6 million shares at a fixed price of $US135 each, which would raise about $US75 billion, and value it at about $US1.8 trillion. And it all starts tonight, when SpaceX lists.

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