US stocks drift as oil falls and SpaceX debuts on Wall Street

NEW YORK (AP) — U.S. stocks are drifting Friday after oil prices fell again and Wall Street welcomed the highly anticipated debut of SpaceX.

SpaceX’s stock surged 11% shortly after it began trading. It’s the first of three gargantuan companies in the artificial-intelligence industry expected to start selling their shares on the U.S. market, and it is being watched as a gauge for how hungry investors still are for AI stocks following vicious swings and big doubts for them over the last week.

The S&P 500 rose 0.1%. The Dow Jones Industrial Average was up 253 points, or 0.5%, as of noon Eastern time, and the Nasdaq composite was 0.3% lower.

Stocks got a lift from a 3.1% dip for the price of Brent crude oil to $87.58 per barrel, deepening its loss for the week. Oil prices have come down since President Donald Trump on Thursday called off his threat to launch strikes on Iran and said a potential deal with Iran may be imminent.

A deal to end the war could reopen the Strait of Hormuz and allow oil tankers to once again deliver crude from the Persian Gulf to customers worldwide. Its near closure since the war began has sent the price of Brent up from roughly $70 per barrel and caused a wave of painful inflation for the world.

Of course, financial markets have rallied in the past on hopes that an end to the war with Iran was near, only to get disappointed each time.

The bigger factor for Wall Street over the last week has actually been AI stocks, and how they have gone from roaring to records to suddenly turning lower. The concern is whether such stocks shot too high, too fast because of AI mania, and their careening moves have sometimes reversed direction by the hour.

Several headed back down the roller coaster Friday following a climb on Thursday. Broadcom's drop of 1.9% was one of the heavier weights on the S&P 500.

Some of the pressure on AI stocks may be coming from investors pulling their money out in hopes of moving it to SpaceX and other big AI-related initial public offerings.

SpaceX jumped 11% to $150 a share as the rocket maker’s stock opened for trading, giving the company a market value of $1.96 trillion and making CEO Elon Musk the first-ever trillionaire. SpaceX also has big investments in AI, part of the reason it has built up $29.1 billion in debt, as of the end of March.

Elsewhere on Wall Street, Adobe dropped 6.9% despite reporting stronger profit and revenue for the latest quarter than analysts expected.

Its stock has lost 42% so far this year, and it announced its chief financial officer is leaving the company on Monday. Adobe is already looking for a CEO to replace Shantanu Narayen, who announced in March that he is stepping aside after 18 years as Adobe’s leader.

In the bond market, Treasury yields rose to regain some of their sharp slides the day before, when oil prices dropped following Trump’s announcement. The yield on the 10-year Treasury climbed to 4.48% from 4.45% late Thursday.

High yields can slow entire economies and undercut prices for all kinds of investments, including stocks and cryptocurrencies. They hit investments seen as the most expensive in particular, and some critics are calling the AI industry a bubble where investment inflated too far.

Yields got a boost after a report suggested sentiment among U.S. consumers is not as bad as economists feared. The preliminary survey from the University of Michigan said sentiment improved by more than expected. U.S. consumers said they were feeling some relief after gasoline prices eased a bit early in the month.

In stock markets abroad, indexes rallied as they caught up to Thursday’s big gains on Wall Street.

South Korea’s Kospi jumped 4.6% and trimmed its losses from earlier this month taken because of sell-offs for AI-related stocks. The Kospi has nearly doubled since the start of the year.

Tokyo’s Nikkei 225 rose 2.8%, and France’s CAC 40 climbed 1.8% for two of the world’s bigger moves.

AP Business Writers Chan Ho-him and Matt Ott contributed to this report.

Traders Edward Curran, left, and Fred Demarco work on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, Wednesday, June 3, 2026. (AP Photo/Richard Drew)

Trader Richard Cohen works on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, Friday, May 29, 2026. (AP Photo/Richard Drew)

A currency trader passes by a screen showing the Korea Composite Stock Price Index (KOSPI) and the foreign exchange rate between U.S. dollar and South Korean won at the foreign exchange dealing room of the Hana Bank headquarters in Seoul, South Korea, Friday, June 12, 2026. (AP Photo/Ahn Young-joon)

A currency trader passes by a screen showing the Korea Composite Stock Price Index (KOSPI) and the foreign exchange rate between U.S. dollar and South Korean won at the foreign exchange dealing room of the Hana Bank headquarters in Seoul, South Korea, Friday, June 12, 2026. (AP Photo/Ahn Young-joon)

Currency traders watch monitors at the foreign exchange dealing room of the Hana Bank headquarters in Seoul, South Korea, Friday, June 12, 2026. (AP Photo/Ahn Young-joon)

NEW YORK (AP) — SpaceX jumped 11% as the rocket maker’s stock opened for trading. That price gives the company a market value of $1.96 trillion and is enough to make CEO Elon Musk the first-ever trillionaire. Institutional and retail investors jumped at the opportunity to buy 555.6 million shares of SpaceX at the offering price of $135 apiece, making it the biggest IPO in history with proceeds of $75 billion. Musk says the company is going public because it needs money to fund its ambitions of putting satellites and data centers in space and eventually establishing a colony of people on Mars.

THIS IS A BREAKING NEWS UPDATE. AP’s earlier story follows below.

NEW YORK (AP) — Elon Musk may never colonize Mars as promised, but enough investors consider the SpaceX founder to be a sort of miracle man that they'll help him reach another fantastic goal Friday when he takes the rocket company public.

The world's richest man is set to become its first trillionaire.

Musk on Friday marked the opening of trading on Nasdaq, where the company's shares will be listed, by joining a ceremonial bell ringing from Starbase, the South Texas home of SpaceX.

He reiterated his lofty goals “to make life multi-planetary.”

“Not just a few astronauts, I mean literally you,” Musk said. “Whoever you are watching this, SpaceX wants to be able to take you to the moon, take you to Mars and ultimately beyond.”

Known for his brilliant technology breakthroughs, as well as wild claims and missed deadlines, Musk is expected to break that trillion dollar mark in the biggest initial public offering ever as investors place bets on a company with losses as big as its ambitions. Ahead of the first trade in SpaceX, Forbes puts Musk's net worth at $982.6 billion.

In addition to establishing a one-million person Martian colony, the company has promised to save humanity by establishing other outposts in space, launch data centers the size of football fields into orbit and outdo rivals Anthropic and OpenAI in the race to make money from artificial intelligence.

To reach its goals, SpaceX needs billions more than it currently takes in from its rocket and satellite business. Between the start of 2025 and March 31, 2026, the company lost $8.7 billion.

Big institutional buyers and smaller-pocketed investors alike have indicated they are willing to take a chance, paying a high enough price for the 555.6 millions on offer to raise $75 billion. That easily tops the current title holder, Saudi Aramco, the oil giant that raised $26 billion in its 2019 initial offering.

Trading in the stock -- symbol, SPCX -- is expected later Friday.

Wall Street bankers that helped take SpaceX public are enthusiastic about the company — and the big fees they will earn — but not everyone thinks the stock price is justified.

Analysts at research firm Morningstar, which doesn't earn any investment banking fees, wrote that the IPO is “significantly overvalued" because of SpaceX's unproven technology and massive capital needs.

They estimate the company is only worth $780 billion — less than half its IPO value.

Still, Musk has pulled off the seemingly impossible before.

The soon-to-be trillionaire — on paper at least — made his fortune by creating two companies, Zip2 and PayPal, that netted him about $200 million at sale. He used that money to start SpaceX and invest in Tesla, and defied the odds by creating a space company that figured out how to reuse rockets and a car company that made electric vehicles cool.

Musk has realized vast sums of wealth for himself, much of it in stock he has yet to cash in or grants for shares he’ll only receive if Tesla or SpaceX hit ambitious performance targets. His recent pay package from Tesla drew criticism from the Vatican. At Tesla, he’s worried shareholders by fighting with regulators or dividing his attention between multiple companies and last year by taking a role in the Trump administration.

But a rising stock price has cured all ills: Since it went public in 2010, Tesla has returned 20,000% for shareholders, or more than $1.2 trillion in investor wealth. That has helped lift Musk’s pre-SpaceX IPO worth to $795 billion, according to Forbes magazine.

SpaceX is the first of three “megacap” companies expected to go public this year, with Anthropic and OpenAI to follow. Nasdaq even revised its rules to allow SpaceX to gain entry into funds tied to its indexes in 15 days, which means investors will end up buying the rocket maker's shares much earlier.

Not all investors are thrilled about SpaceX potentially showing up in their holdings of index funds. Officials from pension funds for firefighters, teachers and other workers in California and New York sent a letter to SpaceX last month decrying some of the provisions in its IPO, including the “super voting shares,” mandatory arbitration of shareholder claims instead of the possibility of lawsuits and how much power Musk will hold over the company.

__

AP reporters Stan Choe and Wyatte Grantham-Philips contributed from New York.

A large inflatable figure depicting Elon Musk stands in Times Square in New York on Thursday, June 11, 2026. (AP Photo/Seth Wenig)

Gwynne Shotwell, President and COO of SpaceX speaks during a bell ringing ceremony for the IPO of SpaceX at the Nasdaq MarketSite in New York, Friday, June 12, 2026, in New York. (AP Photo/Frank Franklin II)

Gwynne Shotwell, President and COO of SpaceX celebrates with colleagues during a bell ringing ceremony for the IPO of SpaceX at the Nasdaq MarketSite in New York, Friday, June 12, 2026, in New York. (AP Photo/Frank Franklin II)

FILE - Elon Musk departs after a welcome ceremony with President Donald Trump and China's President Xi Jinping at the Great Hall of the People, Thursday, May 14, 2026, in Beijing. (AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein, File)