I covered the SpaceX short thesis when veteran hedge fund manager Doug Kass said he planned to bet against it, just days after the Initial Public Offering (IPO). At the time, the stock was riding the kind of retail euphoria that makes fundamental analysis feel almost irrelevant.
Then Jim Cramer weighed in with a June 17 post on X (the former Twitter).
SpaceX could not maintain its meme status. Looks like it couldn’t sustain the walk-up.
SpaceX (SPCX) went public on June 12 at $135 per share. That was the largest IPO in stock market history.
It surged 50% above its offer price within three sessions, briefly pushing the company’s market value to nearly $3 trillion and making Elon Musk the world’s first trillionaire.
Then the Cursor acquisition landed, and the sell-off began. SPCX was trading near $182 on June 18, down roughly 20% from its June 16 peak above $225, with a market cap of approximately $2.40 trillion, according to TheStreet.
Also Read: SpaceX Latest News and Stories
Cursor deal cracks SpaceX momentum
The catalyst for the reversal was SpaceX’s June 16 announcement that it would acquire Anysphere, the company behind the Artificial Intelligence (AI) coding agent Cursor, for $60 billion in an all-stock transaction, Reuters reports. That figure represents roughly 3.4% dilution of SpaceX’s $1.77 trillion IPO valuation.
Morningstar analysts lowered their fair value estimate for SpaceX to $62 from $63 following the deal, citing “sizable dilution” and flagging a best-case scenario of $169 per share if AI revenue improves.
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That Morningstar figure of $62 was already well below the IPO price of $135, which the firm had called “significantly overvalued” before the company even went public.
Oppenheimer analyst Timothy Horan took the opposite view, TipRanks noted. Horan applauded the Cursor deal, raising his price target to $250 from $190.
“This deal is beneficial for both sides,” Horan wrote, according to Forbes, noting that Cursor gains access to SpaceX’s computing infrastructure. At the same time, SpaceX acquires AI coding technology, engineering talent, training data, and user base.
The disagreement between those two views captures exactly the tension driving the stock’s volatility.
SpaceX valuation concerns sophisticated investors keep raising
My review of the SpaceX financial profile raises questions that the IPO euphoria has been answering with retail enthusiasm rather than fundamental analysis.
SpaceX reported $18.7 billion in revenue for 2025, up 33% year over year, but posted a net loss of $4.9 billion, according to CNBC. The company has accumulated total losses of $41.3 billion since its founding in 2002. In Q1 2026, revenue hit $4.7 billion while net losses deepened to $4.3 billion as AI data center scale-up costs intensified, TheStreet reports.
Related: Michael Burry makes a bold call on the SpaceX trade
The only profitable segment today is Starlink, which generated approximately $4.4 billion in EBIT in 2025, according to Motley Fool analysis. The AI business lost $6.4 billion. The rocket business? Also losing money.
Valuation professor Aswath Damodaran called the $28.5 trillion total addressable market cited in SpaceX’s prospectus a “hallucination” on CNBC during IPO coverage.
Kass, who previously warned investors in December 2025 that stocks could retreat 15% to 20% — a call that proved accurate — cited research showing companies debuting above 40 times sales underperform the market by 58% over the following three years. SpaceX is priced at approximately 94 times revenue.
Michael Burry also studied the short trade and ultimately passed, writing he holds “neither short nor, ahem, long,” citing expensive options pricing, according to TheStreet‘s previous reporting.
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$20 billion bond sale signals how much capital SpaceX still needs
The most underreported story in the SpaceX coverage is what comes next for its balance sheet. Bankers are preparing a bond offering of at least $20 billion, according to Bloomberg, with investor calls potentially beginning as soon as next week, starting June 12.
The proceeds would refinance a $20 billion bridge loan maturing in September 2027. That’s a loan that accounts for the bulk of SpaceX’s $29.1 billion in long-term debt as of March 31.
Related: SpaceX acquires Anthropic and OpenAI rival in $60B deal
Bank of America, Citi, JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs, and Morgan Stanley provided the original bridge financing and are expected to run the bond deal, Bloomberg reported.
The company does have meaningful contracted revenue ahead. Google has agreed to pay SpaceX $30 billion for computing power under a cloud services deal through mid-2029, Bloomberg also notes.
Anthropic has a roughly $45 billion agreement over approximately three years, Bloomberg reports. These contracts provide revenue visibility that most newly public companies cannot claim.
But at a market cap of $2.40 trillion on $18.7 billion in revenue and widening net losses, SpaceX is priced for a future that has to go nearly perfectly right. Cramer’s observation that it “couldn’t sustain the walk-up” is less about the business and more about the reality that meme momentum, by definition, cannot last forever.
Related: SpaceX president reveals what investors should be watching
