Catenaa, Saturday, July 18, 2026- SpaceX has erased more than $1 trillion in market value from the rocket and AI giant’s all-time high.
The stock fell 5.4% to $123.99 per share on Friday, giving the company a market value of $1.63 trillion. The value stood at $2.64 trillion at the close on June 16, its third day of trading.
Elon Musk’s company, officially known as Space Exploration Technologies, initially rallied after the largest initial public offering in history, but has lost ground since and is trading below the $135 IPO price.
Friday’s decline comes after the company aborted a launch of its Starship rocket due to an engine issue.
SpaceX said it would make another attempt to launch Starship after scrapping Thursday’s mission. Musk later said on X that the company would swap out two Raptor engines, likely delaying the next launch until early next week.
“Anomalies like this will continue to be inherent to Starship’s aggressive development — pushing the boundaries of reusability, payload capacity, and rapid cadence for Starlink V3 deployment and future NASA Artemis missions,” Raymond James analyst Brian Gesuale wrote in a note to clients Friday. Even with the delay, a launch next week would cut the gap between Starship flights to less than 60 days from 221 days previously, Gesuale wrote.
Gesuale initiated coverage of SpaceX on July 7 with a Strong Buy rating and an $800 price target, the highest on Wall Street and about 545% above where the stock ended on Friday.
Starship is the linchpin of SpaceX’s plan to put data centers in space, expand its Starlink satellite communications network and, eventually, to send humans to the moon and Mars. The company has spent more than $15 billion developing Starship, according to its IPO prospectus in June.
Despite the recent selloff, Wall Street remains largely bullish, with more than 80% of Bloomberg-tracked analysts rating the stock a buy equivalent. The average price target of $235.34 suggests about 90% upside from current levels.
The company, which joined the Nasdaq 100 Index earlier this month, is facing an extended lock-up on insiders that will see shares periodically released into the market over the coming months.
Shares briefly rallied following a Wall Street Journal report that SpaceX is in talks to sell computing power to the US Department of Defense. The company has similar agreements with Alphabet’s Google and Anthropic.
The slump in shares of SpaceX threatens the boom in IPOs linked to artificial intelligence. AI was at the heart of SpaceX’s pitch for its IPO, as the company eyes data centers in space to help it capture a dominant share of an estimated $26.5 trillion total addressable market.
The record offering boosted activity for Wall Street’s biggest investment banks, which hauled in the most revenue from advising on equity offerings in the second quarter since 2021.
