How Musk Kept Bankers Guessing in Sprint to SpaceX IPO

High up in Goldman Sachs’ downtown Manhattan headquarters Thursday afternoon, bankers from Goldman and Morgan Stanley, together with SpaceX executives, toasted the pricing of SpaceX’s IPO over glasses of Champagne. In many ways, it was a replay of hundreds of other such celebrations. But the SpaceX IPO was anything but normal.

For seven months, Wall Street’s premier investment banks had raced to keep up with a whirlwind of changes demanded by SpaceX’s future-seeking CEO, Elon Musk, and his lieutenants. That extended to the first day of trading, where at SpaceX’s behest, every banker and trader on the Nasdaq exchange floor wore green shoes—to signify the green-shoe option, or the extra shares available to sell in the $75 billion IPO.