Liontree Weekly Update
Request Access
Liontree Weekly Update
Request Access
“Our LT Weekly Update is a comprehensive weekly analysis aimed at helping our key corporate and investor clients cut through the noise and stay in front of what we view as the most important themes and developments driving the digital economy.”
- Leslie Mallon, Head of LionTree Public Markets

A roller coaster week ended with a bang with the SpaceX IPO closing +19% above its initial pricing. There are a lot of moving parts when talking about SpaceX but see for some thoughts and perspectives. In the background, while the major indices were up and down, the S&P 500 and Nasdaq closed up roughly +0.7% (following last week’s strong sell off), with semis a major driver (the SOX rallied +9.4%). Optimism on a deal with Iran emerging as soon as next week was a late week catalyst.

Fundamentally, we focused on the below in this edition:

Also to highlight, LionTree served as financial advisor to Harbor Lights Entertainment (formerly National Amusements Inc.) on the sale of Showcase Cinemas U.S. to Kinepolis. Showcase Cinemas U.S. includes 13 movie theaters across Massachusetts, New York, Ohio and Rhode Island and will allow Kinepolis to further expand their U.S. market position.

Enjoy the weekend.

Best,
Leslie

Leslie Mallon

Head of LionTree Public Markets

PH: +1-917-364-6778

SpaceX Officially Blasts Off…

The most highly anticipated (an understatement!) event this week was of course the SpaceX IPO, which set a new precedent for the largest IPO ever with $75bn raised at $135/share. The stock first traded at $150/share, traded as high as $176.52, and closed at $160.95, up ~+19% from pricing. While a strong start out of the gate, today is only day 1 in a long journey which is likely to be exciting, but also choppy along the way. The IPO created a tremendous amount of wealth for early investors, minted a massive number of new millionaires, and also produced one trillionaire…Elon. Initial demand for the deal was reported to be as high as $250bn which, to put that in perspective, exceeds the entire annual GDP of more than 150 countries on earth! A dynamic that is also unique to SPCX is the index inclusion story, given that multiple major index providers rewrote their eligibility rules specifically to fast-track SpaceX. This means that passive funds tracking the Russell 1000 and Nasdaq-100 will be forced buyers as early as 5 days post IPO. The inclusion into the S&P 500 (the largest wave of forced buying) won’t occur until at least mid-2027, leaving that demand as a future catalyst.

While Starlink is just a piece of the bigger picture vision for the company, it is SpaceX’s largest and only profitable segment, generating $11.4bn in 2025 revenue (~61% of total company revenue) at a 63% EBITDA margin. That has brought a lot of focus to the Connectivity sector and satellite stocks came under even more pressure today. While on the topic of Connectivity, we also included a few other connectivity developments this week, though those updates pale in comparison to the SpaceX IPO event!

See below for some additional thoughts and perspectives.

-> Outside the IPO, but another key SpaceX related announcement this week was that the Co entered into a Cloud services agreement with Google; Google will rent AI computing capacity from SpaceX for the next 3 years (Oct ‘26-Jun ‘29), for $920mn per month which equates to ~$30bn, almost 2x SpaceX’s total 2025 top line of $18.7bn ()