The shares of Elon Musk’s rocket and satellite company continued to fall on Tuesday, dropping more than three per cent in early trading and extending a slide that has now erased the better part of a trillion dollars in market value in less than a week.
The losses followed a bruising Monday, when SpaceX shares fell sixteen per cent to close at $154.60, their lowest point since the very first day of trading. That single-day drop came on top of falls of five per cent and three and a half per cent on the two preceding days of trading. Over the three-day stretch, the company shed roughly twenty-three per cent from its recent peak, wiping out more than $600 billion in market value. By the close on Monday, SpaceX’s total market value had fallen to just above $2 trillion.
To understand how striking the reversal has been, it helps to remember where SpaceX was ten days earlier. The company listed on the Nasdaq on the 12th of June in what was described at the time as the largest stock market debut in history. Shares were offered at $135 each. Within days, they had surged to $225.64, briefly pushing the company’s market value above that of Amazon and, for a short time, Microsoft. At that peak, SpaceX was among the six most valuable publicly listed companies in the world.
Anyone who bought shares after that opening day, drawn in by the initial excitement, has now seen almost all of their gains on paper disappear. The stock closed on Monday at $154.60, only marginally above the original offer price of $135. Anyone who bought near the peak has lost nearly a quarter of their investment in a matter of days.
The immediate trigger for Monday’s sharpest fall was the announcement that SpaceX intends to raise at least $20 billion through its first ever bond offering, a form of corporate borrowing in which the company issues debt to investors in exchange for fixed interest payments over time. All three major credit rating agencies, Moody’s, Fitch and Standard and Poor’s, assigned the company investment-grade ratings, meaning they consider SpaceX a credible borrower unlikely to default on its obligations. That assessment would normally be viewed as reassuring news. Instead, the market reacted with concern.
The reason is not difficult to understand. The proceeds from the bond offering are intended partly to repay a temporary loan that SpaceX took out earlier this year to fund its takeover of Elon Musk’s separate computing and social media businesses. That loan must be repaid by September 2027. In other words, the company entered the public market already carrying a significant debt obligation that it always planned to refinance, meaning a substantial portion of the money raised through the stock market debut was effectively spoken for before retail investors had bought a single share. One analyst at Interactive Brokers described the announcement as making investors “wary of the substantial cash required to fund technological ambitions.”
The financial picture has also reminded buyers of the numbers buried in SpaceX’s stock market prospectus. The company lost $4.9 billion in 2025. In the first three months of this year alone, before its public listing, it lost a further $4.28 billion. The division responsible for the bulk of those losses is the computing and data business that SpaceX acquired when it absorbed Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company earlier this year, a unit that lost $6.4 billion in 2025 while generating only $3.2 billion in revenue. Despite those figures, SpaceX’s shares at the peak were trading at roughly ninety-five times its annual revenue. For comparison, Morningstar’s analysts have placed their estimate of the company’s fair value at $62 per share, less than half the price at which shares were trading even after Monday’s falls.
There was some positive news to set alongside the losses. SpaceX announced on Monday that it had $100.8 billion in cash and liquid assets on hand as of the 19th of June. It also confirmed a commercial agreement with Reflection, an open-source computing start-up, to supply it with access to the processing capacity at SpaceX’s Colossus 2 data centre in Memphis. Under the deal, Reflection will pay $150 million per month from July, with the contract running through 2029 and potentially totalling around $6.3 billion over its full term. SpaceX has also previously struck similar agreements with Anthropic and Google for access to the same computing infrastructure.
But those announcements did little to stem the selling on Monday. Broader conditions across technology stocks were not helpful either. Alphabet, Google’s parent company, fell five per cent on the same day amid concerns about the departure of senior researchers. Amazon and Meta each fell sharply. Microsoft declined three per cent. The technology-heavy Nasdaq index fell more than one per cent as a whole.
As CNBC reported, there is a further structural consideration hanging over the stock that investors are beginning to factor in. Under the rules that govern how major stock indices are rebalanced, SpaceX is expected to be added to the Nasdaq-100 index around the 6th of July. When that happens, every fund that tracks the index, including some of the largest exchange-traded funds in the world, with hundreds of billions of dollars in combined assets will be required to buy SpaceX shares automatically. Estimates suggest that mechanical buying could amount to between $22 billion and $27 billion. That money has to come from somewhere, and funds that track the index will raise it by trimming their holdings of other shares, adding further pressure to a technology sector already under strain.
Not everyone has been selling. Cathie Wood’s ARK Invest, one of the more prominent champions of speculative growth companies, used Monday’s weakness as an opportunity to add more than 210,000 SpaceX shares across four of its funds at a combined cost of roughly $32 million. It is a minority position, but it signals that at least some professional investors believe the worst of the selling may be close to done.
Others remain sharply sceptical. The professor at New York University who is widely regarded as the foremost authority on corporate valuations estimated SpaceX’s shares were worth no more than $103 each. The noted short seller Steve Eisman said he was staying well clear of the stock entirely. Market analyst Mohamed El-Erian described the post-listing price swings as simply “wild.”
The company that made Elon Musk the world’s first trillionaire, a milestone achieved during the brief period of peak enthusiasm after the listing, now finds itself in the familiar position of companies that debut to enormous fanfare: waiting for its actual business results to catch up with the scale of expectations priced into its shares.
