SpaceX raised $75 billion in its Nasdaq debut on June 12, the largest initial public offering ever recorded, with total proceeds rising to $85.7 billion on June 15 after underwriters exercised the greenshoe overallotment option.
By June 16, shares had surged 67% from the $135 offering price to a peak of $225.64, InvestorsHub wrote, briefly vaulting the company past Amazon and Microsoft to become one of the five most valuable publicly traded firms on Earth.
Then the trajectory reversed with equal intensity, and the stock cratered over three consecutive sessions, closing at $154.60 on June 22, according to The Motley Fool. This erased roughly $600 billion from the closing peak market capitalization of approximately $2.6 trillion.
Measured from the intraday high of $225.64 on June 16, the total loss reached roughly $920 billion.
Investors who bought shares during the euphoria and held through the collapse now face a familiar post-IPO question: whether the underlying thesis has cracked, or whether the price has simply caught up to reality.
SpaceX bond offering rattles an already fragile stock
The immediate trigger for June 22’s 16.4% single-day collapse was SpaceX’s SEC filing that morning, confirming its first-ever investment-grade bond sale targeting at least $20 billion in senior unsecured notes. Bloomberg had reported the move days earlier, on June 18.
Steve Westly, a venture capitalist and former Tesla board member, argues that SpaceX is essentially three separate high-risk bets bundled together, CNBC confirmed.
SpaceX is three moonshots in one company, but I think they’re going to need to make at least two of these moonshots successful to keep that $2 trillion valuation.
The offering struck investors as jarring because it came just 10 days after the largest equity raise in corporate history. This suggests the $85.7 billion haul may not be enough to fund the company’s ambitions, CNBC reported.
Bond documents disclosed approximately $100.8 billion in cash and $29.1 billion in long-term debt, much of it bridge financing tied to the February acquisition of Elon Musk’s xAI startup, CNBC reported.
Independent analysts flag SpaceX as significantly overvalued
Even after the sell-off, SpaceX trades at a price-to-sales multiple above 90 on a company with $18.7 billion in 2025 revenue that remains unprofitable, Morningstar analysts noted.
Morningstar analyst Nicolas Owens lowered his fair value estimate to $62 per share following SpaceX’s planned $60 billion acquisition of Anysphere, the company behind AI coding platform Cursor, making it the second-most expensive stock in the firm’s entire coverage universe.
“We think the company has been significantly overvalued and investors will have opportunities to buy the stock at more attractive levels after the IPO,” Owens wrote.
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New York University valuation professor Aswath Damodaran arrived at an equity value of approximately $1.3 trillion, roughly 26% below the offering’s target, and called the prospectus’s $28.5 trillion total addressable market figure a “hallucination,” as reported by CNBC.
Gary Black, managing partner of The Future Fund, argued that the stock has “no room for error” at current levels, pointing to a multiple of 175 times fiscal 2026 estimated enterprise value-to-EBITDA, according to Stocktwits.
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SpaceX’s thin float amplifies every swing
Only about 4% to 5% of SpaceX’s total shares currently trade in the public float, meaning relatively modest buy or sell orders can push the price several percentage points in minutes, Yahoo Finance reported.
That scarcity powered the explosive post-listing rally, but it cuts in the opposite direction just as sharply, and the supply picture is about to shift dramatically as insider lockups begin to expire.
S&P projects negative SpaceX free cash flow through 2029
All three major credit agencies assigned investment-grade ratings ahead of the bond sale, with Moody’s at Baa1, Fitch at BBB+, and S&P Global at BBB.
S&P projected that SpaceX would post negative free cash flows through 2029 due to Starship development and AI infrastructure spending, while Moody’s flagged governance concerns tied to the concentration of voting power in a single individual.
Evercore ISI has forecast SpaceX’s annual capital expenditures will climb from roughly $20 billion in 2025 to $732 billion by 2031, with about $666 billion of that directed toward AI, TechTimes reported.
Goldman Sachs, SpaceX’s lead underwriter, separately projects the company will post negative $105 billion in free cash flow in 2029 before turning cash-flow positive in 2031.
What the summer ahead looks like for SpaceX stockholders
Two competing forces will likely define the coming weeks of trading and will determine whether the stock stabilizes or slides further toward the $135 offering price.
On the demand side, TD Securities analyst Peter Haynes has identified July 6 as the likely Nasdaq-100 rebalancing date, with BNP Paribas estimating the inclusion would trigger approximately $8 billion in forced passive buying from index-tracking funds.
On the supply side, the lockup schedule begins releasing insider shares within weeks of that event, creating a structural collision between mechanical demand and motivated sellers who have waited years for liquidity.
Cathie Wood’s ARK Invest used the June 22 decline to add 210,121 shares across four exchange-traded funds, a purchase worth approximately $32.5 million, according to Stocktwits.
The first earnings report, expected in late July or early August, will be the next test of whether revenue growth can begin to support the multiples investors paid during the opening week.
Related: SpaceX stock joins AI bond frenzy