SpaceX (SPCX) briefly dipped below its $135 IPO price during intraday trading, hitting a low of $132.15—a new post-listing low. Although the stock managed to recover to $135.27 at the close, it has now fallen nearly 16% since its June 12 debut on Nasdaq as the largest IPO in history. From its post-listing peak above $200, the company has shed roughly one-third of its market capitalization.
Valuation Drastically Out of Step with Fundamentals
SpaceX’s valuation story has been met with skepticism from the very beginning. At the time of its IPO pricing, the price-to-sales ratio already exceeded 90 times, and in the early days of trading it climbed to approximately 140 times. However, the company generated just $18.674 billion in revenue for the full year 2025, with a net loss of $4.937 billion. In the first quarter of 2026, its AI segment posted an operating loss of $2.469 billion, dragging the company’s overall net loss to $4.276 billion. Starlink, the sole profitable pillar, contributed $3.257 billion in revenue and $1.188 billion in operating profit for the quarter—but its scale is far from sufficient to support a market cap approaching $2 trillion.
A senior market analyst at Capital.com noted that the stock’s decline reflects a combination of “profit-taking, valuation reassessment, and the unwinding of previously extremely optimistic positioning.”
Lockup Expiration Looms, Supply Shock on the Horizon
Veteran investor George Noble recently reiterated his bearish stance, with his core concern centered on the upcoming wave of insider selling. According to his calculations, insider holdings will begin unlocking in phases following the release of the second-quarter earnings report, with insiders able to sell up to approximately 44% of the company’s shares by early September—a roughly 900% surge in the float. These shares were acquired at extremely low costs, creating significant profit-taking incentives. Noble even went so far as to say that SpaceX’s fair value is only around $30 per share.
In the early days of trading, SpaceX’s public float accounted for less than 5% of outstanding shares. This, combined with its rapid inclusion in the Nasdaq 100—which forced passive funds to buy in—artificially created a “short squeeze” dynamic. Noble described it as a “deliberately engineered short squeeze” and “the largest exit and cash-out operation in history.” That game is now reversing.
Conclusion
SpaceX is undeniably a remarkable technology company—Starship’s per-kilogram launch cost is expected to fall below $185, and Starlink’s growth potential is hard to deny. But the capital markets ultimately demand a reckoning with fundamentals. The company’s revenue growth slowed to 15% year-over-year in the first quarter of 2026, down from 33% in 2025, while losses have widened sharply. Combined with the impending lockup expiration, short-term pressure on the stock is all but certain. Miller Tabak chief market strategist Matt Maley perhaps put it most bluntly: this reinforces a market narrative that the prior run-up was built on “hype, speculation, and frenzy—not genuine fundamentals.”
