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SPCX Is Down 32% From Its High

It launched with more fanfare than anything Wall Street had seen in years. Space Exploration Technologies Corp. (NASDAQ: SPCX) went public on June 12, priced at $135, and within four days had shot to an intraday peak of $225.64 on June 16. The market cap briefly crossed $2.25 trillion. Elon Musk briefly became the world’s first trillionaire.

Then the air started coming out.

As of July 9, SPCX is trading around $153, more than 32% off that June high and hovering just above its IPO opening price. The stock hit an all-time low of $145.20 on July 8. On July 7, six major banks ended their post-IPO quiet period and initiated coverage simultaneously, every single one with a buy-equivalent rating. Morgan Stanley came in with Overweight and a $300 target. Goldman set $205. Wells Fargo went $230. Raymond James was the outlier at $800. The stock dropped 7% the same week those initiations hit. That is the kind of disconnect that makes you pay attention.

So what is actually going on here?

Part of it is mechanical. SpaceX joined the Nasdaq-100 on July 7, triggering an estimated $4.3 billion in passive buying from index-tracking funds — into a public float that started around 3-5% of the company’s market cap. Most of that forced buying was front-run and already priced in by the time the inclusion went live. Classic buy-the-rumor, sell-the-news. The pattern is not new — Palantir topped out right around its Nasdaq-100 inclusion in December 2024 and sold off 25% in the weeks after.

The deeper question is whether the business justifies any of these numbers.

SpaceX raised approximately $75 billion at pricing and roughly $85.7 billion after underwriters fully exercised the over-allotment option. The company reported $18.7 billion in revenue in 2025, up 33% from the prior year, and posted a GAAP net loss of approximately $4.9 billion. That puts the stock at roughly 100 times trailing sales at current prices. Even the bulls acknowledge that is a lot to ask the fundamentals to grow into.

What they are buying is not just the rockets. On February 2, 2026, SpaceX completed its acquisition of xAI, adding the Grok AI models, the Colossus data center platform, and the X social network. Starlink has crossed 10.3 million subscribers as of March 31, 2026, more than double the 4.6 million it reported at the end of 2024. Q1 2026 revenue came in at $4.694 billion.

The AI compute revenue is the part that is hardest to model. SpaceX’s Anthropic deal — $1.25 billion per month for access to Colossus capacity — is one of the largest AI infrastructure contracts ever disclosed publicly. Google signed a similar agreement in June 2026, committing $920 million per month for compute capacity through 2029. Together, those two deals alone could add roughly $26 billion in annualized revenue if they run uninterrupted. Morgan Stanley projects SpaceX revenue of $45 billion this year, climbing to $319 billion by 2030.

Here is where it gets complicated. A lawsuit is seeking a court order to shut down the gas turbines powering SpaceX’s Colossus 2 data center, alleging they are operating without the required permits. That litigation could put a portion of the $45 billion Anthropic contract at risk. Analysts expect a lower court is likely to order the turbines offline pending permitting, though it may grant SpaceX time to comply. The stock’s inability to hold its IPO opening price this week appears partly tied to this overhang.

Slight tangent, but worth noting: SpaceX recently announced an agreement to acquire Anysphere — the parent company of AI code editor Cursor — for $60 billion in stock. Annual recurring revenue for Cursor is reportedly around $4 billion, up from roughly $500 million a year ago. The market has not fully digested what that acquisition adds to the picture.

Still. The valuation is the conversation you cannot avoid. At roughly $2 trillion in market cap on $18.7 billion in trailing revenue, SpaceX needs to accelerate growth significantly just to justify where it currently sits, let alone where Morgan Stanley’s $300 target implies it is going. Goldman does not even reach positive free cash flow until 2031. Morgan Stanley’s model does not get there until 2035.

The next real catalyst is August 6. That is when SpaceX reports its first quarterly earnings as a public company. It is also when the earliest lock-up release window begins: about 20% of insider shares become eligible to sell around that date, with an additional 10% potentially tied to price performance thresholds. The supply side of the equation shifts meaningfully on that date. That is why every analyst watching the stock has it circled.

This is not just a SpaceX story. The IPO was explicitly framed as the first of a wave of AI-related public offerings. Goldman Sachs called the debut a proof of concept — evidence that capital markets are willing to finance the AI buildout at scale. How SPCX handles its first earnings cycle may set the tone for the deals and listings that follow it.

There is a credible bull case here. There is also a credible bear case. What is certain is that the market is still figuring out the right price for a company this ambitious, this early in its public life, and this expensive on any conventional metric.

August 6 is where the story starts to sharpen.

For informational purposes only.