Analysis
SpaceX shares fell below their $135 IPO price for the first time on July 23, dropping as low as roughly $115 -- down nearly 47% from the stock's post-listing high of $225.64 reached shortly after its June 12 debut. The decline extends a slide Bloomberg first flagged on July 16, warning that the "SpaceX post-listing collapse threatens IPO market's AI euphoria," and shares fell more than 2% again on July 23 alone as the broader market sold off on Tesla and Alphabet's earnings.
SpaceX's IPO was the largest in history, pricing the company at roughly a $1.77 trillion valuation and instantly making it one of the most closely watched public companies in the market. A stock that has now fallen below its own issue price just six weeks after debuting is a meaningful test case for how durable AI-and-space-era mega-valuations prove once exposed to real public-market trading, rather than private funding rounds where existing investors control the marks.
The decline has a direct second-order effect: Alphabet's own Q2 filing disclosed a $94.1 billion SpaceX stake now classified as marketable securities following the IPO, meaning Alphabet's reported earnings are now directly exposed, quarter to quarter, to SpaceX's continued stock performance -- a dynamic that didn't exist while the position was still private equity carried at cost.
For IPO-market watchers, SpaceX's slide is a sobering data point for the broader AI-infrastructure listing pipeline, including Csquare's own underwhelming July debut and any future Anthropic or OpenAI public offerings, on whether current private valuations will hold up once tested by public trading rather than continuing to be set by insider-friendly private rounds.
Watch whether SpaceX stabilizes above or continues falling below its issue price, and whether the decline affects the pricing terms other AI-adjacent companies preparing to go public are willing to accept.
