SpaceX went public at $150 a share in what became the largest IPO in human history, briefly made Elon Musk the world's first trillionaire, and then proceeded to close Tuesday at $125.33 — below the offering price, still losing money, and bracing for what analysts believe could be a lot more pain. The company reported nearly doubling its revenue to $7.8 billion for the quarter. It also reported a $541 million loss. So: great and terrible, simultaneously, just like everything Musk touches.
The Numbers: Big Revenue, Bigger Spending, No Profit
SpaceX's first quarterly earnings report as a public company landed Tuesday, and it is a document that will mean very different things to very different people. According to NPR, revenue nearly doubled year-over-year to $7.8 billion, beating analyst expectations. The company also reported a $541 million loss for the quarter.
That loss is actually the good news compared to Q1, when SpaceX reported a net loss of nearly $4.3 billion. The company is spending at a scale that makes your eyes water — $18.4 billion in capital investments during the quarter alone — pouring cash into Starlink, spacecraft development, and artificial intelligence infrastructure.
On the earnings call, Musk described a company doing "very big things." He said SpaceX is launching more satellites than the rest of the world combined, that Starlink could carry "a majority of the world's internet" within a decade, and that orbiting AI data centers are planned for next year. "This is not some far future, distant thing," he said. And yet the market, which has to price this company right now, is clearly not sure what to do with any of that.
From $225 to $125: The Fastest Trillion-Dollar Evaporation of the Summer
Let's walk through what has happened to SpaceX's stock price since the IPO, because it is a story that deserves to be told slowly and with appropriate horror. Shares launched at $150 in early June. By mid-June, they hit an intraday high of $225.64. As of Tuesday's close, per NPR, the stock sat at $125.33 — below the initial offering price and more than $1 trillion erased from market capitalization since the peak.
Tuesday was briefly exciting. Shares jumped more than 9% ahead of the earnings report. Then the earnings report came out, and after-hours trading gave most of that back. Classic.
And the pressure may not be done. Thursday marks the expiration of a post-IPO "lockup" period that has prevented SpaceX employees and insiders from selling their shares. When that expires, the supply of publicly tradable shares will more than double. Anyone who has ever watched a lockup expiration knows what usually happens next, and it is rarely cheerful.
The Cheerleaders vs. The Analysts
Cory Johnson, chief market strategist at Epistrophy Capital Research, told NPR something that cuts right to the heart of what's going on here: "Maybe more than any IPO ever, the SpaceX IPO was about hopes and dreams and not the nuts and bolts of the business."
He went further. Johnson observed that some of SpaceX's current revenue is coming from renting out computing data center capacity — and his theory for why that capacity is available is not flattering. He told NPR that it's sitting idle because Grok, SpaceX's AI product, "has not impressed in a fiercely competitive AI market." Renting out that capacity generates revenue in the short term. But as Johnson put it, "in the long term, that's not as good a business as having a great large language model."
His most damning observation was about the investor base itself. "At a certain point you have to decide whether you're going to do business analysis or you're going to break out the pompoms and root for companies," he told NPR. "And I think that for Elon Musk, more than any CEO in recent memory, people pretend to do business analysis when what they're doing is cheerleading." That is a very polite way of describing what happens when a personality cult meets a stock ticker.
The Structural Problems Baked Into This Thing
The initial price spike wasn't just enthusiasm. NPR reports that SpaceX deliberately floated only around 5% of total shares, creating a supply-demand imbalance that inflated the price. Several major indexes, including the NASDAQ 100, also relaxed their normal rules about how soon new issues could be included, generating additional demand that wouldn't ordinarily have been there. Other indexes require at least a year of trading and demonstrated profitability before inclusion. SpaceX cleared neither bar.
Kathleen Curlee, a senior research analyst at Georgetown University's Center for Security and Emerging Technology, told NPR that the market may now be entering "a period of adjustment" to find the actual right price for a SpaceX share. Her other observation was blunter: SpaceX's AI investments are "basically eating up" any profits that Starlink is generating. So the one part of the business that actually works is being fed into the parts that don't. That is a business model. It is not necessarily a good one.
SpaceX also acquired Musk's xAI startup earlier this year as part of its AI push, and its Starship heavy-lift rocket — the vehicle central to every moon and Mars plan Musk has ever announced — continues to be dogged by development delays. The dreams are enormous. The engineering reality is messier and slower.
What Musk Said vs. What the Stock Said
On the earnings call, Musk said his team is "solving some of the hardest engineering problems in the history of humanity" and that the space data centers are coming next year. He talked about launching people to the moon and Mars. He painted, by NPR's account, a picture of a company on the verge of transforming civilization.
The stock dropped in after-hours trading.
That is the whole story, really. The gap between what Musk describes and what the market is willing to pay for it, right now, in actual dollars, is the trillion-dollar question that SpaceX's IPO raised and its first earnings report conspicuously failed to answer.
The Dingo Take
You are supposed to believe that the largest IPO in history, which briefly made its founder the world's first trillionaire, is just going through a "period of market adjustment." Sure. That framing is technically true in the same way that saying the Titanic was experiencing a "buoyancy adjustment" is technically true.
What actually happened here is that a company with no profits, an AI product the market doesn't want, a flagship rocket behind schedule, and a founder whose political toxicity has been actively destroying his other company's brand, was handed $75 billion by investors who were partly buying a spaceship and partly buying a vibe. The structural conditions for the IPO pop — the tiny float, the index rule waivers, the retail investor fan base — were almost custom-designed to inflate the price and create exactly this situation. Now the lockup expires Thursday, insiders can sell, and the adults in the room are calculating what SpaceX is actually worth when you strip away the cheerleading.
Musk may be right that SpaceX is doing genuinely extraordinary engineering work. That has never been the question. The question is whether $75 billion — or whatever the market cap lands at after Thursday's carnage — is a rational price for a company burning cash at historic rates, competing in an AI market it is currently losing, and asking investors to trust that Mars is good for the balance sheet. That is a religious commitment, not a financial one. And religion, as any broker will tell you, does not show up on a quarterly earnings report.
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