Lucid Motors goes public, collects $4.5 billion

Electric vehicle startup Lucid Motors is now a publicly traded company, following the completion of a merger where it fetched an eye-watering $4.5 billion in fresh capital. Shares of the Saudi-owned, California-based startup began trading on the Nasdaq stock exchange Monday morning.

Lucid Motors begins trading today as Lucid Group, Inc., under the new ticker symbol “LCID” after completing a merger with Churchill Capital Corp IV.

Lucid Motors will now turn its full attention back to an even taller task: getting its first electric car on the road, where it will face stiff competition in the luxury market from Tesla, Mercedes-Benz, and others. The startup has said that it plans to start delivering its extremely powerful but serenely luxurious Air sedan later this year, and it has already built more than 100 near-final quality versions at its new factory in Arizona. It has an electric SUV called Gravity in the works, too.

Lucid Motors started looking at merging with a SPAC to raise money in late 2020 and hired Citi to help with the process. How the startup came together with its eventual SPAC partner is still a matter of some debate, though. In January 2021, Bloomberg reported that Lucid Motors was in talks with a SPAC run by financier Michael Klein, who used to work for Citi and has ties to Saudi Arabia. But in filings with the SEC, Lucid Motors and Churchill Capital IV (the SPAC) say that they had not held any talks before that article was published. In fact, they say that article was what brought the two sides together.*