SpaceX to allocate $600M to European retail in blockbuster IPO

European retail investors bought less than 1% of SpaceX’s record initial public offering, a sliver of the biggest first-time share sale in history.

The Elon Musk-led company allocated about $600 million worth of shares to mom-and-pops investors in the European Union, Norway and Switzerland, according to people familiar with the matter.

Overall, there were orders for about four times as many shares than were allocated to the cohort, translating into just short of $2.5 billion of demand, the people said, who asked not to be identified discussing private information.

In order to pull off the biggest IPO ever, Musk sought to tap individual investors around the globe with dedicated local offerings. In continental Europe, the group launched on offering of as much as $7.5 billion across Denmark, France, Germany, Norway, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland, according to a regional prospectus.

SpaceX set aside a large amount of stock for Europe to avoid having to update the local prospectus and delaying the IPO timetable if demand exceeded expectations, one of the people said. SpaceX said in the prospectus that any shares not sold in the local offering could be allocated to investors elsewhere.

The company, formally known as Space Exploration Technologies Corp., also arranged a separate offering in the UK that attracted close to $1 billion in orders, Bloomberg reported last week. UK-based investors received about $364 million worth of stock, a higher percentage than in other markets. Bloomberg