New Delhi, June 12 -- NEW YORK - On a Friday morning in June, at the Nasdaq MarketSite in the heart of Times Square, Gwynne Shotwell rang the opening bell to a crowd of audible cheers. A few hundred miles south, at SpaceX's sprawling compound in Starbase, Texas, Elon Musk watched on a screen, his voice beamed into the room, telling employees and the watching world that he wanted to take them to the Moon, to Mars, and ultimately beyond. What followed was not merely a stock market debut. It was the formal transfer of a 24-year-old private bet on the future of civilization into the hands of ordinary investors, at a price that shattered every record the financial world had assembled.

SpaceX began trading on the Nasdaq on Friday under the tic...