Remember when SpaceX went public and everyone lost their minds? Yeah, that was last week. Elon Musk’s rocket company had what you’d call a “near-flawless” market debut—the stock jumped 19% on day one, briefly pushing SpaceX’s valuation to nearly $3 trillion. For about five minutes, it was the fourth-most valuable company on Earth, leapfrogging both Amazon and Microsoft. Musk became the world’s first trillionaire. Retail traders were piling in like they’d just discovered free money. It was beautiful. It was glorious. It was unsustainable.
Welcome to day three of the reality check.
SpaceX shares have now dropped for three consecutive trading days, with Monday’s session seeing the stock plummet over 5% to $175 per share. That’s a $10 drop from where it was trading just hours earlier. Last Wednesday and Thursday? Another 8% nosedive before markets closed for Juneteenth. The company’s market cap has cooled from that $3 trillion fever dream down to $2.4 trillion. Still massive, obviously, but the air is definitely leaking out of this particular balloon.
Here’s the thing nobody wanted to talk about during the IPO party: SpaceX lost $4.9 billion in 2025. Yes, billion with a B. On $18.7 billion in revenue. That’s a loss margin that would make most investors break out in hives. Some analysts were already questioning the valuation—somewhere between $1.75 and $1.77 trillion—before the IPO even happened. Turns out, those skeptics might have been onto something.
But let’s pump the brakes on the doom-and-gloom narrative. Even with this three-day slide, SpaceX shares are still up nearly 30% from their IPO price. That’s not exactly a disaster. It’s more like a correction—the market’s way of saying, “Okay, cool company, but let’s be realistic about what it’s actually worth.”
The real story here isn’t that SpaceX is tanking. It’s that the market got drunk on hype and is now nursing a hangover. This is what happens when you combine Elon Musk’s cult-of-personality following with retail traders who think they’ve cracked the code, all chasing a company that literally shoots rockets into space. The narrative is intoxicating. The fundamentals? Less so.
SpaceX still has Starlink, Grok, and its core rocket business. Those are genuinely impressive assets. But they don’t justify a $3 trillion valuation when the company is hemorrhaging cash. The market is learning what institutional investors already knew: there’s a difference between a cool company and a good investment.
So what happens next? Probably more volatility. The stock will likely find a floor somewhere between here and the IPO price as the market figures out what SpaceX is actually worth. Retail traders will either hold for the long game or bail. Institutional investors will quietly accumulate at lower prices. And Elon will probably tweet something that sends the stock up 10% on a Tuesday.
Welcome to public markets, SpaceX. It’s not all lift-off.
