I’m not sure what’s more surreal: watching a rocket company flirt with becoming the most valuable business on Earth, or realizing the market barely blinked at the fact that it’s still losing billions. For a brief stretch of trading, SpaceX pushed past Amazon to become the world’s fifth-most valuable company, and it even edged close to overtaking Microsoft before the momentum cooled and the stock gave back some of its gains.
If you’re wondering whether that kind of leap sounds “normal,” you’re not alone. But the tape doesn’t care about normal. It cares about narrative, liquidity, and the promise sometimes the pure audacity of what comes next.
The week SpaceX decided gravity was optional
The stock’s first full day of trading delivered a jolt: shares climbed about 20%. Then the next session brought fresh fuel. News that SpaceX is buying the AI coding company Cursor, combined with the launch of options trading on SpaceX shares, pushed the price sharply higher again. At the intraday peak, the company’s valuation ballooned to roughly $2.9 trillion before slipping back.
Those two catalysts an acquisition headline and a brand-new options market are the kind of combo that can turn an already-hyped stock into a live wire. Options don’t just reflect enthusiasm; they can amplify it. When traders pile into calls, market makers often hedge by buying shares, which can accelerate upside moves. It’s not magic, but on days like this it can look suspiciously close.
Yes, it lost money and the market shrugged
Here’s the part that should make any fundamentally minded reader pause. SpaceX reported a loss of $4.9 billion on $18.7 billion in revenue last year. Compare that with Amazon, which posted $78 billion in profit on $717 billion in sales. If you grew up believing markets reward earnings power, you might ask: What exactly is being priced here?
The answer, at least in the way the market is currently voting, is “optional future cashflows”—especially those linked to AI. SpaceX has recently pointed to new revenue avenues through deals to lease computing capacity to Anthropic and Google, and it expects to add Cursor’s revenue once that acquisition closes in the third quarter.
It’s worth underlining that the Anthropic and Google agreements aren’t binding. In another era, that detail might have mattered more. Today, investors seem comfortable treating non-binding deals as proof of demand rather than a footnote about risk. The market’s mood is clear: show me the direction, not the paperwork.
The trillion-dollar re-rating since the IPO
Since its market debut, SpaceX has added roughly $1 trillion in valuation. That’s not a typo. And it happened almost immediately—an illustration of how quickly a public listing can become a referendum on expectations instead of a reflection of historical performance.
The IPO itself was historic: SpaceX entered public markets at around a $1.7 trillion valuation and raised close to $86 billion in fresh capital. But the structure mattered as much as the size. Only about 4% of total shares were made available for trading. Analysts warned that such a small float could make the stock unusually vulnerable to sharp swings—because when demand surges, there simply aren’t many shares to absorb it, and the price has to move.
If you want a one-line explanation for the recent drama, try this: massive attention + limited float = violent price discovery.
Cursor, xAI, and the “we rebuilt it from scratch” sales pitch
The Cursor acquisition gave the story a crisp AI angle. SpaceX is buying the AI coding firm in a stock deal valued at $60 billion. The company had previously signaled a relationship with Cursor when Elon Musk said the AI arm—xAI, now part of SpaceX—“wasn’t built properly the first time” and was being rebuilt “from the ground up.”
That’s an unusually candid admission in corporate life, where executives typically pretend every past decision was genius. But the confession also functions as a kind of promise: if the first attempt was flawed, the second attempt will be the real one. Investors appear to be paying for that second attempt today.
Still, there’s a tension you can’t ignore. SpaceX is leaning into the idea that it can create an AI business worth trillions—while acknowledging it recently dismantled its AI operation and rebuilt it. That’s either refreshing honesty or a warning label, depending on how cynical you feel.
Options arrive, volatility follows
If the acquisition headline was the match, the debut of options trading was the gasoline. In a single session, traders swapped more than 300 million SpaceX shares—over half of the roughly 555 million shares available to the public after the IPO, according to Nasdaq data. When turnover gets that intense, price becomes less like a carefully weighed estimate and more like a live auction.
And the turbulence didn’t stop at the closing bell. In after-hours trading, SpaceX briefly topped Amazon’s market capitalization again before sliding back once more. That back-and-forth tells you something important: this isn’t a quiet repricing; it’s an ongoing fight over what the company should be worth.
So what are you actually buying?
If you’re considering SpaceX—or even just trying to understand why it can leapfrog profit machines like Amazon—you have to separate today’s numbers from tomorrow’s belief system. Right now, the market is buying a bundle of narratives:
- Space infrastructure as the next industrial platform, not just a business line.
- AI as a second engine, with compute leasing and coding tools as early building blocks.
- Scarcity, driven by a small publicly traded float.
- Momentum mechanics, intensified by options trading and headline velocity.
Whether those narratives mature into durable cashflows is the real question—and it’s one the market won’t answer in a single euphoric week. For now, SpaceX has done what very few companies can: it has made investors feel like the future is happening all at once. The rest is what it has always been—execution, economics, and time.
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