Markets do not run on spreadsheets alone. They run on stories, on the moment a crowd decides the future is worth paying up for. Every big rally needs a spark that makes the math feel beside the point.
For months, the loudest voices on Wall Street have been the cautious ones. Valuations look stretched, the artificial intelligence (AI) trade looks crowded, and plenty of strategists have warned that the easy money is gone. The bears have had the microphone.
Then a rocket company went public and changed the conversation. SpaceX (SPCX) made its Nasdaq debut on Friday, June 12, and jumped 19% to close at $160.95, becoming one of the world’s biggest listed companies on day one, according to NPR. It was the largest initial public offering (IPO) in history.
That single trade did something no research note could. It gave the bulls a story again. And one of Wall Street’s most-watched strategists thinks it could be the start of something far bigger. Evercore (EVR) ISI now argues the listing could hand the S&P 500 a path to 9,000, a level that would punish anyone betting the rally is finished.
Why the record SpaceX IPO has stock market bulls dreaming again
The setup matters here. SpaceX priced its offering at $135 a share and raised roughly $75 billion, the biggest market debut Wall Street has ever seen, and its first-day pop pushed Elon Musk‘s rocket maker above $2 trillion in value.
It is not arriving alone. The deal is the opening act for a run of marquee technology listings, with Anthropic, the maker of the Claude AI assistant, having confidentially filed for its own IPO and OpenAI widely expected to follow.
Related: SpaceX IPO reminds investors where real fortunes start
What makes the debut land harder is who got to play. SpaceX stayed private for more than two decades, then set aside close to a third of its public shares for everyday investors instead of the usual sliver. This is why a “request shares” button suddenly showed up in millions of brokerage apps.
Evercore strategist Julian Emanuel reaches back three decades for his frame of reference. He likened the excitement around SpaceX to the 1995 Netscape IPO, the deal that lit the fuse on internet optimism before the dot-com bubble burst in 2000.
The moment “draws comparison to the hype last seen in 1999,” Evercore strategists said, according to Investing.com.
That parallel cuts both ways, and the bears know it. The Netscape moment that kicked off a historic run also marked the early innings of a mania that ended in tears five years later.
What Evercore’s path to 9,000 means for the S&P 500
Here is where Emanuel makes his case. In his bull scenario, the SpaceX debut “could catalyze ‘Dream Big FOMO’ and the next leg of the Bull Market,” he wrote, according to CNBC. The fear of missing out, or FOMO, is the fuel.
The call breaks down into three pieces.
- A bull case that lifts the S&P 500 to 9,000, more than 20% above the prior week’s close of 7,431.46, a scenario Emanuel puts at about 30% odds
- A base case of 7,750, only about 4% above current levels
- A record $7.9 trillion sitting in money market funds that could flood into stocks if sidelined investors decide to chase the move
Source: CNBC
I ran Emanuel’s bull target against that prior-week close, and the gap is striking. Reaching 9,000 means roughly a 21% climb from where the index sat, the kind of year that turns a tired 401(k) into a very different number.
For a worker with $200,000 in an index fund, that is about $42,000 on paper, the difference between dreading a market headline and scrolling past it.
That $7.9 trillion is not abstract, either. It is cash that real people moved into money market funds when rates were high and stocks felt risky, and it earns a steady yield sitting still. The bull case rests on a simple human question: whether those savers can watch a rocket stock keep climbing and still do nothing.
Emanuel is not waving away the danger. He concedes that the S&P 500 tends to post below-average returns the deeper a cycle runs.
But he points to the absence of recession signals, bond yields that remain contained, and IPO activity that is tame by historical standards, with equity issuance running near 0.5% of the S&P 500’s market value, according to CNBC.
Where the stock market bears still have room to push back
The skeptics have not gone quiet. Margin debt has surged, households hold more of their wealth in stocks than at any point on record, and the speculative heat around a trillion-dollar rocket stock is exactly the sort of thing that makes veteran investors flinch.
In my experience watching a few of these cycles, the bull and bear cases rarely sit as far apart as the headlines make them seem. Emanuel’s own base case calls for just 4% upside. The 9,000 print is the dream, not the forecast, and he gives it less than a coin flip’s odds.
There is also a catch worth knowing if you are tempted to chase SPCX itself. The rocket maker is unlikely to enter the S&P 500 anytime soon, because S&P Dow Jones Indices still requires four straight quarters of profitability under generally accepted accounting principles, or GAAP, before a company can qualify.
So the message to the bears is not that they are wrong. It is that the story has shifted, and stories are what move markets between earnings dates.
The next test arrives when Anthropic and OpenAI line up their own debuts. If that sidelined $7.9 trillion starts to move, Emanuel’s long shot stops looking quite so long.
