Shares of Space Exploration Technologies Corp. dropped as much as 6.0% in morning trading on Thursday, touching a session low of $176.60 as profit-taking intensified in the wake of a spectacular debut and short-lived rally.
The stock had climbed rapidly from $135 to an intraday peak of $225.64 over just three trading days following the company’s initial public offering. That ascent was followed by a reversal that began Wednesday, representing the first down day since the public listing. On Wednesday the stock closed down almost 5%, a sign of post-IPO exhaustion after SpaceX briefly surpassed Amazon in market capitalization on a valuation basis.
Investors pointed to valuation-related concerns as a key driver of the selling. Those concerns were amplified by SpaceX’s announcement, shortly after its IPO, of a $60 billion all-stock acquisition of Anysphere, the maker of the AI coding tool Cursor. The deal has divided institutional investors over the company’s capital allocation strategy.
Compounding uncertainty is an impending lock-up expiration in August, which some market participants see as a potential source of additional share supply. Attention has also shifted toward recently disclosed financials: SpaceX’s IPO filing showed a net loss of $4.9 billion in 2025 and a further net loss of $4.28 billion in the first quarter of 2026. The filing also indicated that Starlink remains the company’s only profitable segment.
Price action in the earliest days of trading underscored investor exuberance and its limits: within 48 hours of trading, the stock exceeded the highest published price target, while Morningstar’s fair value estimate remains well below the market price. Those valuation divergences have added to friction among buy-side institutions evaluating the new public company.
Wider market strength did little to cushion the decline in SpaceX shares. The S&P 500 was up 0.9%, the Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 0.4% and the Nasdaq gained 1.2% on the same day, highlighting how sharply SPCX underperformed its peers.
Monetary policy considerations were also in the background. The Federal Reserve left its benchmark interest rate unchanged at 3.50%–3.75% for the fourth meeting in a row on June 17, and new Fed Chair Kevin Walsh outlined a reform agenda. While that environment has generally supported many growth-oriented names, it did not prevent selling pressure in SpaceX shares.
On the analyst front, Arete initiated coverage on Thursday with a buy rating, according to a market report. Arete’s Andrew Beale pointed to a substantial suburban broadband opportunity driven by Starlink’s V3 satellites and emphasized that SpaceX is taking staged approaches to engineering challenges across space, connectivity and AI hardware and software. Arete set a street-high price target of $401 for SPCX, which implies a 109% premium over Wednesday’s closing price of $191.82.
Separately, NASA selected Relativity Space to build a spacecraft for an upcoming Mars mission named Aeolus. The spacecraft will carry NASA instruments to measure and image Mars from orbit, and the mission is scheduled to launch in 2028. The selection underscores ongoing public-private collaboration in space exploration, though it does not directly concern SpaceX’s recent share movements.
As SpaceX moves beyond its IPO debut, investors are weighing rapid early gains against acquisition strategy, recent losses and potential future share supply, factors that together have contributed to the current pullback in the stock.