SpaceX Shares Close at Record Low, Below June IPO Price, After Six-Day Slide

A Sixth Straight Losing Day

Shares of Space Exploration Technologies Corp., trading under the ticker SPCX, closed at $123.99 on Friday, July 17, 2026, down about 5.4% on the day^[17]. It was the stock's sixth consecutive daily decline and an all-time closing low, pushing the price below the $135 set just five weeks earlier in the company's initial public offering^[2][17]. The drop capped a slide of roughly 45% from the intraday peak of $225.64 reached on June 16, days after SpaceX had gone public as the largest IPO in history at a valuation reported near $1.77 trillion^[3][15]. At Friday's closing price, the company was worth about $1.6 trillion^[17].

The timing was not incidental. A day earlier, on July 16, SpaceX aborted its Starship V3 Flight 13 test just seconds before liftoff, after several Raptor engines failed to ignite^[13][14]. Musk said two of the engines would be replaced and that another launch attempt would come "early next week," but the scrubbed flight landed atop an already-souring week for the stock^[13].

What Isn't in Dispute

Certain facts anchor the story regardless of how any side frames it. SpaceX priced its IPO at $135 a share on June 12, 2026; shares opened at $150 and closed the first day at $160.95 before climbing to their $225.64 peak four days later^[1][3][15]. The company reported 2025 revenue of about $18.7 billion, up roughly 33% from the prior year, alongside a net loss of about $4.9 billion^[3]. In June, Musk merged his AI startup xAI into SpaceX, rebranding the combined AI operation "SpaceXAI," and the company issued about $25 billion in bonds, largely to repay debt tied to that acquisition^[14]. Short interest in SPCX climbed to roughly 185 million shares — about 29% of the stock's free float, an unusually high level for a newly listed company^[11][12]. Published analyst fair-value estimates span an extraordinary range, from about $62 at the low end (Morningstar) to a mean target above $290 (Visible Alpha)^[8][3][17].

The Pressure Underneath the Price

Beneath the daily headlines sit three structural realities that would apply no matter who is telling the story. A company losing billions annually while investing heavily in AI and Starship development needs cheap access to capital, and a falling stock paired with bonds trading at junk-level yields makes that harder to sustain^[7][14]. Only about 5% of SPCX shares were floated at the IPO, with lockup expirations set to release far more supply in the coming months — meaning price movement is driven in part by mechanics of share availability, a force distinct from the underlying business^[5]. And much of the company's trillion-dollar-plus valuation prices in long-shot, high-payoff outcomes tied to Starship and AI, which is why "fair value" for SpaceX functions less as a calculation than a bet — a dynamic reflected in the gulf between $62 and $290-plus analyst estimates^[8][17].

Materially, SpaceX operates the world's busiest launch cadence and a profitable Starlink satellite network, generated roughly $18.7 billion in revenue in 2025, and still posted a net loss near $4.9 billion while ramping up AI spending^[3][14]. It now carries about $25 billion in freshly issued bonds, and the large majority of its shares remain locked up but will progressively become tradable^[14][5]. Those facts hold steady whether one reads the sell-off as a bubble deflating or as a temporary dislocation.

How Each Side Sees It

SpaceX and Musk describe the current slide as noise obscuring a sound business. In their framing, the launch-and-connectivity operation remains solid and Starlink is profitable, while the AI investment represents a bet on a much larger future rather than a warning sign; the drop, in this account, reflects short-selling pressure and lockup mechanics rather than a verdict on the company's prospects. Musk has projected roughly $1 trillion in revenue by 2030 and said "SpaceX will be worth more than the rest of Earth if we accomplish our goals"^[14]. The company has an evident interest in sustaining a high valuation, which keeps capital cheap for Starship and AI development, protects Musk's net worth — heavily concentrated in his SpaceX stake, which fell by reported amounts ranging from about $59 billion to far larger figures as the stock dropped — and helps retain employees compensated in equity^[16][14].

Bearish investors, short sellers, and skeptical analysts see a valuation that detached from fundamentals. In this account, a company trading at more than 80 times trailing sales while losing billions annually cannot be squared with its stock price, and the AI unit represents what one analyst called "a material threat of value destruction," with the company's bonds trading at junk-level yields despite investment-grade ratings^[8][7][17]. Short sellers, who held roughly $25 billion in bets against the stock, stand to profit directly from further declines and have an incentive to publicize what they view as IPO froth; each new low lends their thesis credibility, though a sharp rebound could force costly short-covering^[11][12].

IPO underwriters and long-term bulls occupy a middle position, arguing SpaceX is a generational company whose Starlink cash flows and Starship and AI potential justify patience — and that the drop reflects mechanical supply pressure from lockup expirations and short-selling combined with one launch setback, not a broken business, noting that most Wall Street price targets remain well above the current share price^[17][5]. Underwriters have a direct stake in defending the credibility of a landmark deal and supporting the aftermarket, since a break below the offer price is reputationally damaging and could complicate pricing for future mega-IPOs^[2][5]. Retail and institutional bulls, for their part, are simply seeking to buy at what they view as a discount. Ordinary retail investors face a harder task: navigating a stock where credible fair-value estimates span more than fourfold and where a wave of insider selling could flood the market as the tradable float is projected to rise from about 5% to as much as 40% of shares by December^[8][5].

How the Coverage Split

Business-focused outlets like CNBC largely stuck to event-driven, numbers-first reporting — tracking the IPO price breach and rising short interest without moralizing about Musk, while also giving the bullish case its own citable data points, such as options positioning skewed bullish and Wall Street's still-elevated average price target^[2][11]. NBC News took a similarly market-based approach but leaned into the symbolic weight of the stock falling below its IPO price for the first time[NBC]. International outlets took a more distanced view: Al Jazeera framed the story around the sheer scale of the swings — describing a "$600bn sell-off" — treating it as spectacle of American market excess rather than a referendum on Musk personally^[15].

Commentary-driven outlets tilted more skeptical. The Motley Fool ran advice-oriented pieces with loaded framing — "Buy the Dip or Run for the Hills?" — that emphasized losses and downside targets, though the same outlet also published a more bullish-leaning "Buy the Dip?" piece the same week, making its overall coverage mixed rather than uniformly bearish^[3][17]. Forbes contributor Peter Cohan led with the bond market's warning signs, an interpretive choice that presumes deeper trouble beneath the equity decline^[7]. International Business Times UK pushed the sharpest framing of all, contrasting SpaceX's valuation against Meta and Berkshire Hathaway combined with the observation that the company generates less revenue than Macy's — a deliberately jarring comparison designed to make the valuation look absurd^[8]. Across all of it, the undisputed record — the IPO price, the losses, the bonds, the aborted launch — remains the same regardless of which frame a reader encounters first.