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The SpaceX IPO in the final stages before making its debut. And Leslie Picker joins us now from the floor of the trading floor of Morgan Stanley in New York City, the stabilizing agent uh and one of the big underwriters behind this major IPO. Leslie. Hey, Andrew. Now that SpaceX has officially priced its record-breaking IPO, bankers here at Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs and the other book runners are calling hundreds of investors and letting them know how much stock they'll receive out of what they requested. This process started last night. It continues into the morning until all of the orders are confirmed. It's a bullish sign for investors to receive these calls and be told that they're only getting a
fraction of the shares that they had requested. Uh this process, you know, that's why many investors tend to inflate their indications of interest because they expect to get cut back. So even though I'm told this deal was five times overs subscribed, uh the actual demand will kind of be determined from this uh this process. advisers will get a clearer picture of demand once they get through uh these phone calls. Uh but SpaceX won't start trading as soon as the so-called syndicate is broken. It will take uh hours and hours. And that's really where the stabilization agent comes in. In this case, it's Morgan Stanley. A key part of that job is making the market for SpaceX stock,
pulling in the buy and the sell orders and studying them to determine what price it should open. If it opens too low, the stock could overshoot. If it opens too high and there's not enough support, it could fall. So, the goal is to open with as little volatility as possible. Morgan Stanley traders here will be looking, you know, essentially for enough volume to feel comfortable opening SpaceX shares, and that can take hours. So, we'll probably not see a first trade until after lunchtime. Guys, uh I talked to a bunch of people last night. a lot of hand ringing, lots of frustration uh from a number of firms that were trying to get allocations uh specifically for retail investors. This
idea that they were going to um uh allocate about 30% to retail looks like it's been cut back to at least 20% if not uh lower. Uh there were obviously a lot of big firms that had been vying for those shares uh hoping to capture them on behalf of their clients uh and the like. Do we have any real sense why they pulled back on that plan? So, I've been calling around and asking specifically why. I think some of it just has to do with the nature of what constitutes retail, what constitutes institutional investors. I was told, you know, if you have a an individual who's a billionaire, do they really in their kind of investing through their family office, is that institutional, is that retail? So, I think part of it just has
to do with the overall categorization of this deal. If you, you know, recall retail is kind of wide-encompassing for SpaceX. So it includes those ebrokers, it includes, you know, Robin Hoods of the world and SoFi's of the world. Obviously, that's been a really key contingency for Elon Musk. Um, you know, with Tesla over the years, he's had a strong retail following, um, you know, at least through Tesla. So, that was really important to him for this one as well. Uh, but it also encompasses a lot of the private banks for the underwriters that are attached to the underwriters, a lot of international retail as well. So my understanding is that just the delineation between what was constituted retail versus
institutional kind of changed over the course of uh you know the road show. Additionally, they got some pretty significant institutional orders as
