Three days & three trillion: What does the SpaceX IPO reveal?

Folks, pour yourself a coffee cause this is a long one, and if you have the patience to read it you might just learn something new. We want to walk through what we just saw with the IPO of SpaceX, because we don't think one investor in a hundred has stepped back far enough to see the whole shape of it.

A company got listed at $135 a share and opened at $150 per share on a Thursday very early afternoon. By the following Tuesday morning it's knocking on Microsoft's market cap door, valued at roughly $2.9 trillion. The stock has risen by nearly 70% since its IPO, and has added about $1.2 trillion in market cap. To put that in plain English: in the span of two trading days, this listing created the equivalent of a top-fifteen public company out of thin air, on top of itself. And then, before Tuesday's bell, it announced it was buying Cursor for $60 billion in stock, expanding its so far loss-producing AI business with xAI.

Now, at Scope Markets, we're monetary-plumbing people at heart, so our first instinct is never "is this right or wrong" - it's "what does this reveal?" Let us give you the bull and the bear honestly, because both of them are smarter than the headlines suggest.

The bull case: scarcity, reflexivity, and future value

Start with the float, because almost nobody is talking about it in the way we need, just so we understand what’s going on. SpaceX's IPO represented approximately 4.2% of its total shares outstanding, which increased to about 4.9% after the full exercise of the greenshoe option, resulting in extremely limited market float. That is a tiny slice of the company changing hands. When you have the most-talked-about asset on Earth and you let only a sliver of it trade, price discovery is happening on scarcity instead of fundamentals. Every retail dollar, every institution that has to own it, is fighting over a thimbleful of shares.

And the forced buyers are coming for it, as effective June 26th, SpaceX will be added to the FTSE Russell indices, with MSCI and the Nasdaq 100 expected to follow suit; passive demand from index funds is likely to provide upward momentum for the stock. Index inclusion forces passive money to buy at any price, which lifts the price, which lifts the market cap, which deepens the index weighting. This is a flywheel, and right now it's spinning with almost no shares to absorb it.

Then there's the actual business, which the bulls argue you're not supposed to value on this year's earnings. The launch monopoly is staggering: the space launch business, powered by Falcon 9 and Starship, accounts for approximately 83% of global orbital payloads. That's not a market share, that's basically the infrastructure that powers global launches into space. Starlink is the cash engine underneath it: Starlink is the company's only profitable segment, projected to contribute $11.4 billion in revenue in 2025.

So what is the bull thesis in one breath? That SpaceX is a 25-year option on owning the rails to space and a meaningful chunk of the AI stack that does provide some services to none other than Anthropic and Google, while the scarcity of float plus index demand means the market is pricing that optionality today rather than in 2031. Musk himself is dangling the number — Elon Musk stated publicly on Monday that he would be "surprised" if the company's annual revenue does not reach $1 trillion by 2031.

And just today the company also announced it is acquiring Cursor in a $60 billion all-stock transaction. To a bull it's the tell that management is playing a much bigger game than rockets. By integrating Cursor, SpaceX aims to accelerate its "Macrohard" autonomous platform, utilizing internal computing power to optimize costs and transition from an aerospace firm into an AI-integrated powerhouse. Crucially, the capital raised in SpaceX's IPO is not being used to fund the deal, it's all-stock, paid with that richly-valued currency.

The Bear Case: The Loop Runs Both Directions

Now let’s take the opposite view and strip away the narrative and look at the income statement the market is… well, ignoring. One widely-shared breakdown laid it bare: SpaceX had a revenue of $19 billion, but its net income was -$9 billion, and the company reported a loss of approximately $4.3 billion in the first quarter of 2026. Set that beside the company it just blew past: Microsoft's revenue coming in at $318 billion, with a net income of $125 billion. So the market is, this morning, assigning roughly the same value to a business losing nine billion dollars on nineteen billion in revenue as it is to one earning a hundred and twenty-five billion. You can tell yourself a 25-year story to bridge that gap, but the gap is the size of a continent.

And the capital intensity is not slowing, on the contrary - it's accelerating violently. SpaceX's capital expenditures in the three months ended March totaled $10.1 billion versus $4.1 billion in the same period last year. The majority of that went toward artificial intelligence. That's for a company which is spending ten billion dollars a quarter and burning cash, and whose valuation rests on the promise that all of that spending will eventually compound into dominance.

The sell-side bears have already planted their flags with CFRA on Friday initiating coverage of the stock with a "sell" rating and a 12-month price target of $115, citing the company's extremely ambitious growth strategy, elevated valuation expectations, and significant capital intensity. Morningstar is even starker: analyst Nicolas Owens released a note on June 8th, in which he said the firm values SpaceX at $63 per share.

The combined market cap of SpaceX and Tesla had surpassed Apple's, and Elon Musk's net worth and Tesla's value are now lashed together with SpaceX's by a web of shared narrative and, increasingly, shared paper. A 4.9% float means it took very little buying to drive the price this high. It will take very little selling, when the lockups expire and the float widens, to drive it the other way.