SpaceX stock tanks 3%: are investors fleeing after Monday's $400B rout?

SpaceX stock NASDAQ:SPCX fell again in premarket trading on Tuesday, extending a sharp post-IPO reversal that has raised some hard questions for investors.

The stock slipped about 3.5% before the open to roughly $149, putting it close to the symbolic $150 level and only about 10% above its $135 IPO price.

Monday’s 16.4% plunge wiped more than $400 billion (approx. R 6,8 trillion) from SpaceX’s market value, following earlier declines of about 3.6% and 5%.

The shares had briefly touched $225.64 on June 16, making the speed of the reversal hard to ignore.

SpaceX stock: What broke the rally

The immediate trigger was SpaceX’s move into the bond market.

On Monday, the company announced a senior unsecured notes offering, only days after completing the largest initial public offering in US history.

SpaceX raised $85,7 billion (approx. R 1,5 trillion) from its IPO and would use proceeds from the debt sale for general corporate purposes and to repay borrowings under a bridge loan facility.

That may be sensible balance-sheet management, but it landed badly with equity investors.

The concern is simple: why does a company with more than $100 billion (approx. R 1,7 trillion) in cash need to raise debt so soon after a record IPO?

For a stock that had already been priced for near-flawless execution, the bond announcement gave sceptics a fresh reason to question the capital intensity behind Elon Musk’s rockets-to-AI empire.

The pressure is not only from debt. SpaceX’s $60 billion all-stock deal for Cursor has also raised dilution concerns.

Morningstar analyst Nicolas Owens cut his fair value estimate to about $62 a share after the deal, arguing that the market is already assigning enormous value to uncertain future businesses.

Fleeing or buying the dip?

The market reaction is split as Cathie Wood’s ARK Invest treated Monday’s selloff as an opportunity, buying 210,121 SpaceX shares across four ETFs, worth about $32,5 million (approx. R 556,4 million) at Monday’s closing price, according to Stocktwits data.

That is not panic selling. It is conviction buying.

But the bears have not gone quiet.

Gary Black, managing partner of The Future Fund, said on X that SpaceX remains “hard to justify analytically,” pointing to valuation multiples of roughly 175 times fiscal 2026 EV/EBITDA and 62 times EV/revenue.

He added that the stock has “no room for error,” a phrase that neatly captures the risk of owning a company priced for decades of breakthroughs.

CFRA’s Keith Snyder has also taken a cautious view, initiating coverage with a Sell rating and a $115 price target.

The Wall Street Journal reported that Snyder described the growth assumptions needed to justify even optimistic valuations as “borderline comical.”

Retail sentiment has weakened too, as Stocktwits-linked reports showed sentiment turning bearish from extremely bullish levels as message volumes surged after the bond news.

Yet the same community is not fully giving up. A Stocktwits poll showed 45% of more than 5,600 respondents still named SpaceX as the space stock they were most bullish on for the next five years.

That is the split market in one sentence: institutions like ARK are buying the dip, while retail traders are asking whether the dip is finished.