“It took just a few trading sessions for one of the biggest wealth surges in market history to start running in reverse.”
Elon Musk has seen an eye-watering $350 billion wiped off his paper fortune in about a week, after a brutal selloff in SpaceX shares turned what had looked like a historic stock market triumph into a reminder of how fast market euphoria can crack.
The drop is tied directly to SpaceX’s rocky days after its blockbuster IPO.
The company came to market earlier this month in one of the most closely watched listings in years. At first, investors piled in. SpaceX shares surged, its valuation briefly climbed close to $3 trillion, and Musk’s personal fortune shot past the $1 trillion mark, a milestone no one had reached before. For a moment, the excitement around the stock made it look like the market had decided SpaceX could do almost anything and still be rewarded for it.
That mood did not last.
By Monday, the stock had fallen sharply again, extending a three-day slide that erased hundreds of billions of dollars from SpaceX’s market value. Shares dropped 16.4% in one session to close around $154.60, leaving the company down more than 30% from its June 16 peak. Forbes estimates cited in multiple reports put Musk’s fortune down from roughly $1.45 trillion at the high to just under $1.1 trillion, with Monday alone wiping out more than $150 billion.
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That is the headline number. The more important part is why the market turned so quickly.
Investors appear to be stepping back from the frenzy that followed the IPO and asking harder questions about valuation, debt and how much faith they are willing to place in Musk’s long-range ambitions. SpaceX has already signalled plans to raise around $20 billion in bonds, even after pulling in huge money from the IPO, and that has fed fresh concerns about how much capital the company still needs for its AI and space expansion plans. Reuters reported last week that bankers were preparing a major bond sale while the company also pushed ahead with a $60 billion all-stock acquisition of Anysphere, the startup behind the AI coding tool Cursor.
That combination is not exactly calming investors.
SpaceX is still one of the most talked-about companies in the market, but it is also not profitable. The company posted heavy losses last year even as enthusiasm around its rockets, Starlink business and AI ambitions helped drive its valuation into territory usually reserved for the biggest names in global tech. Once the stock started slipping, that same valuation became harder to defend.
Musk’s exposure to the fall is enormous because of how much of SpaceX he owns. Reports say he controls roughly 38% of the company, including billions of shares and stock options, so every major move in the share price hits his net worth with unusual force. That is how a stock reversal can produce a headline like this one without Musk actually selling anything. The money is largely paper wealth, but the swing is still real enough to reset the ranking of the richest person on earth in a matter of days.
There is also a bigger lesson in the speed of it all.
SpaceX’s rise after listing was so explosive that it briefly looked detached from the usual rules of public markets. Retail traders rushed in. The stock’s early gains pushed it above giants like Amazon and close to Microsoft in market value. But when momentum reversed, the fall was just as violent. One minute Musk was adding historic sums to his fortune. The next, SpaceX was giving back huge chunks of that rally almost as quickly as it came.
For now, Musk is still unimaginably rich. Even after losing $350 billion on paper, he remains around the $1.1 trillion mark by Forbes’ estimate.
But the bigger point is not that he is still rich. It is that the first real wobble in SpaceX’s public market life has shown just how unstable this new era of Musk wealth can be. When a fortune is tied this tightly to a stock moving on hype, momentum and belief, the climb can look unreal.
So can the drop.
