Business
SpaceX stock erases all its gains and slides below IPO price in intraday trading
SpaceX’s mega rocket Starship in Boca Chica, Texas.
(Eric Gay / Associated Press)
By
Annika Duneja
July 16, 2026
3 AM PT
4 min
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SpaceX stock dropped below its initial public offering price for the first time on Wednesday, signaling dwindling hype around the Elon Musk company.
Shares dipped below their IPO price of $135 on Wednesday morning for the first time since listing, a humbling loss for the stock, which had skyrocketed more than 50% in its first days of trading last month.
The shares regained some ground later in the day, closing at $135.27.
The initial offering gave the company a market cap of $2.2 trillion, making it one of the world’s most valuable public companies. For a short period, the IPO also made owner Elon Musk the world’s first trillionaire, though his net worth now is about $800 billion.
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On July 7, the company was added to the Nasdaq-100 after a rule change allowed companies to join 15 days after their IPOs.
SpaceX raised a total of $86 billion after underwriters exercised their right to sell additional shares, on top of the $75 billion initially raised. It was the largest IPO in history.
SpaceX, based near Austin, Texas, is the leading launch services company in the world, with its Falcon 9 rocket accounting for the vast majority of satellites launched last year.
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It is also the leading satellite-based broadband provider with its
Starlink service.
The extraordinary interest in the IPO was driven by Musk’s plans to make the company an AI leader — including plans to launch orbiting satellite data centers powered by the sun that crunch AI data.
The company’s headquarters moved from Hawthorne to Texas in 2024, but it retains large operations in the South Bay city and
blasts off regularly
from Vandenberg Space Force Base in Santa Barbara County.
Since the IPO, SpaceX has used its newfound wealth to expand in the AI space.
It announced last month that it was
acquiring
the AI coding startup Cursor
for $60 billion, with the deal expected to close in the third quarter. The San Francisco company, founded in 2022, enables engineers to instruct software in English to run coding tasks autonomously.
Musk also
merged his xAI artificial intelligence company
into SpaceX earlier this year. The combined entity recently announced it was leasing computing power to rivals Anthropic and Google at two terrestrial data centers it has constructed.
Since the IPO, investors have expressed concerns about the company’s spending plans and debt load.
Even with the volatility of the last month, there’s still more uncertainty to come.
The stock could fall further as locked-up shares held by current and former employees are released.
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At least 20% of the shares
will be released after second-quarter results are disclosed sometime in the coming months, with all the lockups expiring in December.
But Space X isn’t the only megacap stock to experience ups and downs early on.
Shares of Meta, then named Facebook, fell significantly below the IPO price of $38 before recovering. After its May 2012 launch, shares plummeted by nearly 50% and hit a record low of $19.69 in August 2012.
The company took more than 14 months to rebound, finally surpassing its $38 IPO price in July 2013.
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Annika Duneja
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Annika Duneja is a business reporting intern at the Los Angeles Times. She graduated from the Hussman School of Journalism and Media and the Kenan Flagler Business School at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she wrote for the Daily Tar Heel’s City & State Desk. She has previously worked at CNBC and NBC4 Washington, and is a native of Washington, D.C.
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