Square Closes At $13.07 Per Share, Up 45% From IPO Price
Square's shares pop in first day of trading. Shares of Square, the payment technology company founded and led by Twitter TWTR 1.60% CEO Jack Dorsey, closed at $13.07 per share, up 45% from its initial pricing of $9 per share Square …
Context & Ripple Effects
Square's first day of trading closes a deliberate discounting arc: the company filed publicly on $560.6M in first-half revenue against a $77.6M loss, set its range at $11-$13 per share — already below its last private valuation — and then priced at $9, beneath even that range, valuing it at $2.9B.
The 45% pop to $13.07 is the market's verdict on that haircut, and it lands on Jack Dorsey, who is running Square while also CEO of Twitter — a dual role under scrutiny until the debut gave him a clean answer.
First-order effects
- Investors who received the $9 IPO shares captured an immediate 45% gain, while Square and selling holders raised capital at roughly $1.6B less than the top of their own stated range would have implied.
- Dorsey's dual-CEO setup gets its strongest rebuttal yet: a first-day close above both the IPO price and the original $11-$13 marketing range.
Second-order effects
- The below-range pricing plus instant pop validates the strategy other late-stage unicorns are watching — underpricing to guarantee a tradeable debut rather than defending a private-round valuation.
- Twitter, where Dorsey spends his other half, now faces an awkward comparison: the payments company he co-runs opened with more market momentum than the social network itself.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds — private marks written down at IPO, public buyers rewarded for the discount — 2015-era unicorn valuations get structurally repriced at the public-market boundary, and the 2017 trajectory in which Square's rising stock puts it within reach of passing Twitter in value shows how quickly that repricing can reverse into outperformance.
The trend: Late-2015 IPOs are trading down private valuations deliberately to buy a reliable public debut, with Square the template case for discount-now-outperform-later.