SpaceX Stock Slips Below Its IPO Price Just Weeks After Going Public

Key points

• SpaceX shares fell below $135 on Wednesday, dropping as low as $133, before recovering back to around the IPO price.
• SpaceX raised nearly $86 billion when it went public on Nasdaq on 12 June 2025.
• The stock hit above $200 shortly after the IPO but has lost ground almost every week since.
• Only 4% of SpaceX's total shares are currently available to trade, which makes prices swing sharply.
• Both Anthropic and OpenAI have confidentially filed for their own IPOs, and investors are watching SpaceX closely as a guide.

SpaceX had one of the most talked-about stock market debuts in years. Shares in Elon Musk's rocket company went on sale at $135 each on 12 June 2025, the company raised nearly $86 billion, and within days the stock shot past $200. For a brief moment, SpaceX was valued on par with tech giants like Amazon and Microsoft.

That shine has faded fast.

On Wednesday, the stock slipped below that original $135 IPO price, the price at which early buyers first got in. It dipped as low as $133 before bouncing back. That kind of slide, just a month after going public, is the sort of thing that makes investors nervous.

Part of the choppiness comes down to a quirk of how SpaceX went public. Only 4% of the company's total shares are actually available for everyday buying and selling on the Nasdaq. This is called the "float," meaning the portion of shares in free circulation. A tiny float means even modest shifts in demand can send the price swinging wildly. Add in the constant media attention on Musk and his company, and you get a volatile first month.

Broader tech-stock jitters are playing a role too, as first reported by TechCrunch. It is not just the share price under pressure: bonds SpaceX sold around the time of the IPO are also losing value, which suggests investors are broadly cooling on the company's near-term promises.

Those promises are grand. Musk has talked openly about colonising Mars and reshaping global internet access through Starlink satellites. Big visions are exciting, but markets eventually want to see progress.

Thursday gives SpaceX a concrete chance to do that. The company plans a test launch of its Starship rocket, the giant two-stage vehicle it is developing for deep-space travel. This will be the first Starship flight since a booster failure in May. SpaceX builds rockets the way a chef tests recipes: fly it, see what breaks, fix it, repeat. That means failures are expected and built into the process.

Importantly, SpaceX does not plan to recover either the booster or the upper stage on Thursday's flight. Both will deliberately splash down in the Gulf of Mexico in a controlled explosion, even if the flight goes perfectly. So expect dramatic footage either way.

Why should anyone outside SpaceX care?

Because SpaceX's stock performance is now a weather vane for the whole next wave of big tech IPOs. Both Anthropic, the company behind the Claude AI assistant, and OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, have quietly filed paperwork to go public. Neither has named a date, but both are watching SpaceX's stock the way a surfer watches the waves before paddling out. A sustained drop could cool enthusiasm for those offerings, affecting how much money those AI companies raise and what they do with it.