Jul 22, 2026
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Add us on GoogleSpaceX has erased almost $1 trillion in stock market value in five weeks — more than most individual companies in the world are worth.
Retail investors who fought for shares at the $135 IPO price are down about 10% now. Those who bought four days later, at the June 16 peak of $225.64, are down around 40%. A 40% discount on the hottest company in the world may look like an obvious buy, but that instinct is exactly what needs examining.
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“Hype and quality are not the same thing,” Matthew Fleissig, CEO of the wealth management firm Pathstone, warned in a recent MarketWatch column. The next two weeks will test which one SpaceX has been trading on.
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SpaceX (NASDAQ:SPCX) is set to report its first earnings as a public company on Aug. 4, and two trading days after that, hundreds of millions of insider shares will become eligible to sell for the first time. Short sellers already control close to a third of the stock’s tradable float.
What’s happening to SpaceX stock
SpaceX priced its IPO at $135 a share on June 11, raising $85.7 billion in what became the largest public offering in history. Shares jumped to $160.95 on their first day of trading on June 12, then kept climbing. By June 16, the stock touched an intraday high of $225.64, pushing the company’s valuation briefly past $2 trillion.
It’s been mostly downhill since. Shares fell for seven straight sessions through July 20, sliding 21% in that stretch to close at $119. The stock finally caught a break Tuesday, climbing as much as 7% to $128 after Macquarie analysts stood by their outperform rating and called the selloff a buying opportunity. Shares lost some steam in intraday trading, however, and closed at $123.54.
Along the way, Meta passed SpaceX in market value — $1.64 trillion to $1.59 trillion.
The company’s own missteps haven’t helped. SpaceX scrubbed a Falcon 9 launch that was supposed to put 24 Starlink satellites in orbit, and pushed back its 13th Starship test after several engines failed to start — two of them had to be pulled and replaced. Growth is slowing too. SpaceX grew revenue 33% in 2025; in the first quarter of this year, that rate fell to 15%. And the company is still deep in the red — with a $4.9 billion net loss last year on $18.7 billion in revenue.
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Why the next two weeks matter
Short interest in SpaceX keeps climbing. It stood at 5% to 7% of the tradable float a month ago. Last week it was 185 million shares, 29% of the float. Now it’s near 206 million shares, or 32% — roughly $25 billion riding on the stock falling further, according to S3 Partners. The firm’s head of research, Matthew Unterman, told CNBC, “We continue to see short sellers adding exposure ahead of several key upcoming catalysts.” Shorts are deliberately positioning for Aug. 4 and the share unlocks behind it. That 32% is a level almost unheard of for a company this size; Apple’s short interest hovers near 1%.
Musk isn’t taking any of this quietly. Firms that keep betting against SpaceX, he wrote on X, have a “very low” chance of surviving — and he repeated his claim that, if goals are met, the company “will be worth more than Earth.” His own fortune is riding on it. Forbes’ Real-Time Billionaires Index put his net worth above $1 trillion on IPO day; by July 20, it was down to roughly $786 billion. The short sellers, for now, are winning the argument, as they were sitting on an estimated $8.7 billion in paper profits as of mid-July.
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SpaceX deliberately spread its insider sales across several dates instead of one, so the market wouldn’t get flooded all at once. The first release is still massive. Two trading days after the Aug. 4 report, 911.5 million insider shares will become free to sell — no strings attached.
A second batch of 455.8 million shares does have strings: The stock must close above $175.50 on five of the 10 trading days before the report. That’s nearly 40% above today’s price.
And the stock is still expensive. Even after the slide, SpaceX was trading at 49 times expected revenue as of mid-July, down from close to 140 times in the frenzy of its first trading days. Morningstar put SpaceX’s fair value at $780 billion before the IPO even priced. The market, even now, is paying about double his number.
Buying the dip
Before the IPO, getting SpaceX exposure was a sport. People worked every angle — venture funds that happened to hold shares, private-market middlemen charging steep markups, anyone with a connection.
Some of those same people are now too nervous to buy at a discount to the price they once begged for. Gavin Baker, an early SpaceX investor and chief investment officer at Atreides Management, isn’t one of them. He told CNBC this week that the pullback looks like a normal part of any IPO, and that he isn’t losing sleep over it.
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The underlying business, at least, is not really in dispute. Starlink runs roughly 9,600 satellites, and Falcon rockets land successfully more than 99% of the time, per the company’s IPO prospectus. And the AI-infrastructure unit SpaceX bought in February, formerly known as xAI, already rents computing capacity to Google, Anthropic and Reflection, with the Pentagon reportedly in talks to do the same.
There’s a case for the stock bouncing from here. Nearly a third of the float is sold short, and a squeeze works like this: If the stock starts rising, everyone who borrowed shares to bet against it has to buy them back to cap their losses — and all that forced buying sends the price up even faster.
Musk’s own 42% stake stays locked up until June 2027. Most analysts are still bullish: 27 of the 28 tracked by Investing.com rate the stock a buy. And there’s precedent for patience — Meta traded below its own IPO price for more than a year before becoming a trillion-dollar company.
That said, Wall Street’s price targets for SpaceX span from $62 a share to $800 — a $738 gap that tells you how little agreement there is on what this company is worth.
If you’ve waited this long to own SpaceX, waiting two more weeks costs you nothing except the fear of missing out.
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Godwin Oluponmile is a content specialist, SEO strategist and copywriter with seven years of expertise in finance, Web 3.0, B2B SaaS and technology. His work has been featured in publications such as Entrepreneur, HackerNoon, Blocktelegraph and Benzinga.
