Retail traders poured a record $405 million into the IPO on Musk's Mars-and-AI promises. Then the company's losses reminded everyone what they had bought.
SpaceX has spent its first two weeks on the public market lurching between euphoria and doubt, a debut that has turned one of the largest IPOs in history into a daily referendum on how much investors will pay for an Elon Musk promise.
The stock priced at $135 a share on June 12, opened higher, and ran up more than 60% from that offering price at its peak, briefly carrying SpaceX past Amazon and Microsoft by market value. Then it handed much of that back. A 5% drop bled into a 4% drop, then a 16% plunge, before the price eased into smaller moves in both directions.
The swings say plenty about what kind of stock this is.
SpaceX trades on a story, and the story keeps getting repriced in real time.
An IPO for the record books
The listing itself was historic. SpaceX's June 12 debut ranked as the biggest IPO ever and pushed Musk to the edge of becoming the world's first trillionaire on paper. First-day trading volume approached the frenzy of Facebook's 2012 arrival, and the company's market value vaulted past $2 trillion within its opening sessions.
Scale is part of why the volatility cuts so deep. When a company this size moves 16% in a session, hundreds of billions of dollars in market value vanish or reappear. A three-day slide later in the run erased more than $600 billion, enough to mint and unwind paper fortunes inside a single week.
A stock that runs on narrative
Gil Luria, head of technology research at D.A. Davidson, draws a hard line between SpaceX and the rest of the market. Ordinary shares move on how their earnings multiple compares with peers. Musk's companies, in his telling, skip that exercise and trade on what buyers expect years down the road.
He uses Tesla as the template, where the price leans more on a planned robotaxi service and a humanoid robot than on the cars leaving the factory. SpaceX behaves the same way. What moves it is not last quarter's launch revenue but the promise of Mars, and lately the pitch to build data centers in orbit to power AI.
That forward-looking bet is what pulled in small investors.
Retail piled in at a record pace
Vanda global macro strategist Viraj Patel ran down why retail tends to bite on names like this. There is a breakthrough-technology pitch, a sweeping vision of the future, a celebrity at the top, and press coverage that never lets up. SpaceX checked every box.
The money arrived fast. Across the first five trading sessions, retail investors bought a net $405 million in SpaceX shares, which Vanda called the strongest retail IPO debut in recent history.
Morningstar Wealth's Mike Coop, who oversees investments for the EMEA region, gave the mood a label. The "cult of Elon," he said, drags in retail money and stacks on hype, the same force that kept Tesla shares jumping for years.
His firm had already picked a fight with the optimists. Ahead of the listing, Morningstar analysts pegged the stock's worth at less than half of its $1.75 trillion target, and one note put fair value near $63 a share while flatly calling it overvalued.
Then the arithmetic showed up
Once the opening rush faded, the price started answering to fundamentals, a shift Capital.com analyst Kyle Rodda likened to a hangover.
Those fundamentals are unforgiving for anyone watching profit today. SpaceX booked $18.7 billion in revenue in 2025 and lost $4.9 billion in the process. The first quarter of this year piled on another $4.28 billion in losses.
Musk answered the way he usually does. On June 14 he floated the prospect of SpaceX reaching roughly $1 trillion in annual revenue by 2030, a target that would require sales to climb more than fiftyfold from their 2025 level inside five years.
The cost of chasing that vision is already on the books. SpaceX moved to sell investment-grade bonds for the first time, the opening of what is expected to be a heavy borrowing run to bankroll its AI and orbital plans, and the sharpest of its single-day drops landed in the same stretch as that debt news. The company reported about $100.8 billion in cash as of June 19, while its first-quarter capital spending more than doubled from a year earlier to $10.1 billion, most of it aimed at AI.
The skeptics see the risk, and sit on their hands
Coop laid out two slower-burning problems. Share supply will swell as early backers trim positions and lock-ups expire. And the price, by his read, already sits too high for a business losing this much money and demanding this much capital to keep going.
Almost no one is backing that skepticism with cash.
Michael Burry, the investor immortalized in "The Big Short," said on June 16 that he holds no position in SpaceX. He openly questioned a market value pressing toward $3 trillion, then argued the options needed to bet against the stock cost too much to make the wager worthwhile. Other short sellers are circling, but few want to stand in front of a Musk rally, which is keeping most of them parked on the sidelines.
