Analysis
SpaceX went public June 12 at roughly a $1.77 trillion valuation, raising $75 billion in the largest IPO in history. The stock peaked above $225 in the weeks that followed, and now trades close to 39% below that high -- back near its original $135 offering price, a round trip that has wiped out most IPO-day paper gains in barely six weeks.
The drawdown is notable because it isn't happening in a vacuum of bad news. SpaceX has kept moving aggressively since its debut: an all-stock merger with Elon Musk's xAI that values the combined entity near $1.25 trillion, and a $60 billion all-stock acquisition of Anysphere, the maker of AI coding tool Cursor. Those are the kind of expansionary moves a confident, well-capitalized company makes -- and the stock has sold off through both of them, suggesting investors are pricing execution and integration risk on the M&A rather than rewarding scale for its own sake.
“The drawdown is notable because it isn't happening in a vacuum of bad news.”
That's the real lesson for the AI-infrastructure IPO pipeline building up behind SpaceX. Private markets only ever marked SpaceX's valuation upward across its history as a private company -- there was no daily price discovery to punish ambitious bets. Public markets are now doing in six weeks what private markets never did across two decades: testing whether the growth story justifies the multiple in real time, with no smoothing.
Anthropic, DeepSeek, and any other AI-adjacent company eyeing a near-term listing now have a concrete, recent data point for what awaits after the opening-day pop: sustained scrutiny of every follow-on move, M&A included, priced daily rather than assessed at the next funding round. That's a materially different discipline than the one these companies have operated under as private entities.
What to watch: whether SpaceX stabilizes as the xAI and Anysphere integrations mature, and whether its aftermarket performance affects how aggressively Anthropic prices its own rumored October listing.
