SpaceX spent its second week as a public company collecting the highest praise a borrower can get and, in the same 48 hours, the kind of selling a brand-new stock dreads.
On Thursday, 18 June 2026, Moody’s, Fitch and S&P Global Ratings each handed the company an investment-grade credit rating. That same session, SPCX closed down nearly 4%, the second leg of a slide that erased about 8.3% from the all-time high the stock had set only two days earlier. One set of judges blessed the balance sheet. The other marked down the price.
That split is the whole story. For the millions of retail investors who piled into the largest initial public offering ever recorded, it is a quick education in how differently bond markets and stock markets read the same company. Bondholders want to know they will be paid back. Shareholders are paying for a future that has not happened yet.
The numbers behind the round trip are worth pinning down. SpaceX priced its IPO at $135 a share on 11 June and opened on the Nasdaq the next day under the ticker SPCX, closing its debut at $160.95 — a first-day gain of 19.2%. The climb continued into the following week, peaking at $225.64 on Tuesday, 16 June, a level that briefly pushed the company’s market value past $2 trillion. Counting the underwriters’ over-allotment, the offering raised roughly $85.7 billion, the most ever pulled in by a single public listing.
Then it turned. A Federal Reserve decision to leave interest rates unchanged on Wednesday knocked the broader market and snapped SpaceX’s winning streak, sending the shares down about 4.95% to around $191.82. Thursday was worse: SPCX fell as much as 10% intraday before closing near $175. The rest of the market shrugged, with the S&P 500 up 0.9% and the Nasdaq up 1.2% that day. That made the drop a SpaceX problem, not a market one.
The credit verdict cut the other way. The ratings (Baa1 from Moody’s, BBB+ from Fitch and BBB from S&P, all with a stable outlook) clear the way for a debt sale the company badly needs. SpaceX is preparing its first US-dollar investment-grade bond, an offering of at least $20 billion, with banker calls expected as early as next week. The proceeds would refinance a $20 billion bridge loan, taken out to fund February’s acquisition of Musk’s AI venture xAI, before it matures in September 2027. Bank of America, Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley arranged the bridge and are lined up for the bond.
Investment-grade status matters here for a plain reason: it unlocks the large pool of institutional buyers barred from touching junk-rated paper, and it lowers the yield SpaceX has to pay. The bridge already did some of that work — it replaced $17.5 billion of high-cost debt from xAI and X that carried rates as high as 12.5%, dropping the effective rate to 4.58% as of 31 March and roughly halving the annual interest bill to about $900 million.
Hanging over the equity side is the deal investors are still digesting: SpaceX’s $60 billion all-stock purchase of Cursor, the AI coding startup, announced on 16 June and expected to close in the third quarter. Morningstar analyst Nicolas Owens trimmed his fair-value estimate to $62 from $63 after the news, citing what he called sizable dilution
of about 3.4%. At Thursday’s close near $175, that puts the stock at roughly 2.8 times Morningstar’s fair value — the second-most expensive name in the firm’s entire coverage. Even its most generous scenario tops out at $169, below where the shares now trade.
Wall Street is not unanimous. The spread between the bulls and the bears is unusually wide.
| Firm | Price target | Stance |
|---|---|---|
| Arete Research | $401 | Sees a $5.3 trillion valuation within a year |
| Oppenheimer (Timothy Horan) | $250 | Cursor accelerates the AI pivot |
| Morningstar (Nicolas Owens) | $62 | Price far ahead of fundamentals |
The fundamentals explain the caution. SpaceX booked $18.7 billion in revenue in 2025, which at Thursday’s price implies a price-to-sales multiple north of 90 even before counting the losses: a net loss of $4.28 billion in the first quarter of 2026 alone, wider than the $528 million it lost a year earlier, with the xAI unit accounting for a $2.5 billion operating charge. What the rating agencies are actually endorsing is narrower and steadier: Starlink, the satellite-internet service that now counts about 12 million subscribers and remains the only consistently profitable part of the business, plus a launch arm that flew 165 orbital missions last year and lifts more than 80% of the world’s payload mass to orbit. Two signed cloud contracts back that up: roughly $30 billion from Alphabet through mid-2029 and about $45 billion from Anthropic over some three years.
None of this is the first wobble — the stock had already taken its first post-IPO stumble a day earlier — and it feeds directly into the running argument over whether AI valuations have outrun reality. Fitch added its own caveat, flagging governance risk tied to Musk’s 79% voting control. And the supply that has propped up the price is temporary: only 4% to 5% of the stock trades freely, with about 95% locked up. The first insider selling windows open as early as late July, around the company’s 6 August quarterly report, with broader unlocks due in December and Musk’s own stake freed around June 2027.
So the next verdict will not come from the stock ticker. It will come from the bond desk, where investors pricing $20 billion of SpaceX debt have to answer a colder question than any retail buyer chasing the rocket: can this company pay, no matter what the share price does on any given Thursday?
