London, 16 July 2026 — EBM Newsdesk Analysis — By Katie Winearls
On Wednesday 15 July, shares in Elon Musk’s SpaceX fell through their $135 flotation price for the first time, closing at $135.27 after dipping to about $132. That leaves the group worth roughly $1.75tn, down from a peak above $2.6tn last month that briefly made it more valuable than Amazon and Microsoft. The four-day slide has wiped more than $1tn off the company since mid-June and cut Musk’s 42 per cent stake from about $1.2tn to $760bn. The more revealing number in this sell-off, though, is not the share price.
It is the bond market. SpaceX raised $25bn of debt in late June to fund its artificial-intelligence ambitions, and those bonds have fallen almost without pause since they began trading. The rout has pushed a closely watched basket of hyperscaler bonds to its widest spread since the gauge launched in February, the strongest sign yet that lenders are starting to question how much borrowing the AI build-out can carry. When the safest part of a company’s capital structure wobbles, the equity rarely holds for long.
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SubscribeA record that was always a story about AI
SpaceX went public on 12 June in the largest flotation ever, raising $86bn and pricing at $135 a share for a valuation near $1.77tn. [INTERNAL LINK: SpaceX June IPO coverage — needs live URL] The listing made Musk the world’s first dollar trillionaire. It also completed a quiet transformation. In February the company absorbed Musk’s AI venture xAI, and by the time of the IPO the prospectus rested a $28.5tn addressable market on artificial intelligence rather than rockets. Nearly 90 per cent of that claimed opportunity came from AI.
That framing flattered the valuation on the way up and now works against it. Investors bought a space company and were handed an AI story, and AI stories have cooled sharply this month. The stock surged nearly 50 per cent in its first three days, touching $225 on 16 June, before giving most of it back.
The debt is the real signal
SpaceX is not the only company borrowing heavily to build AI infrastructure, and that is precisely why its bonds matter. The $25bn issue was part of a wave of hyperscaler debt sold this year to pay for data centres and chips whose returns remain unproven. Its slide has dragged the wider basket of such bonds to record-wide spreads, the first clear sign that credit investors are losing patience with the AI spending boom. Equity markets can price hope. Bond markets tend to price cash flows. When the two disagree this loudly about the same company, the bond market usually turns out to be the more sober judge.
Why the rally unravelled
Three forces are pulling the shares down. The first is simple profit-taking by early holders sitting on large gains. The second is the exhaustion of technical support: underwriters have already used the “green shoe” that let them buy stock to steady the price, so there is no official buyer of last resort left. The third is the macro backdrop, where the prospect of further Federal Reserve rate rises weighs on every richly priced tech name.
Index mechanics made the fall faster. SpaceX joined the Nasdaq-100 last week after the exchange shortened its eligibility rules for new listings, pulling passive funds into the stock near its highs. Those same funds now sell as the price drops.
The fundamentals underneath
Strip away the AI framing and the numbers are sobering. SpaceX lost $4.9bn in 2025 and posted a further $4.3bn loss in the first quarter of 2026, with an accumulated deficit above $41bn. Only Starlink makes money. The satellite-internet arm generated about $11.4bn last year, roughly 61 per cent of revenue, and passed 10 million subscribers. Everything else, from Starship to the data centres Musk wants to build in orbit, still consumes cash.
This is why analysts cannot agree on what the company is worth. Price targets run from $60 to $800, a spread so wide it tells you valuation here is an act of faith, not arithmetic. Morningstar puts fair value near $780bn, well under half the listing price.
What to watch next
Three catalysts arrive quickly. SpaceX flies its thirteenth Starship test today, and a visible success or failure will move sentiment before the market can catch its breath. First public earnings land in early August. Soon after, an early lock-up expiry could release more stock into a market already struggling to absorb it.
The wider stakes reach beyond Musk. SpaceX was meant to open the door for a wave of AI listings, with Anthropic and OpenAI both filing confidentially. Its stumble is now the clearest test yet of whether public investors will keep paying imagination prices for unproven AI economics. On the evidence of this week, the honeymoon is over.
