SpaceX shares had peaked at $225.64 on June 16, but less than a week after the largest IPO in history, shares crashed to $147.11 briefly dipping below the opening price before recovering again to close at around $156.

The slide wiped roughly $600 billion off SpaceX’s market value in less than a week. Monday’s 16 per cent drop alone erased about $400 billion, one of the biggest one-market-cap losses ever recorded by a US company.

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The IPO priced shares at $135 on 12 June, raising $86 billion and briefly pushing Elon Musk past the trillionaire mark.

What spooked investors, however, was not the debut but what followed. SpaceX announced a $60 billion stock acquisition of Cursor, a San Francisco AI coding startup founded in 2022, and sold $25 billion in bonds mere days after going public.

S&P Global has assigned SpaceX a BBB credit rating, the lowest possible investment grade, noting “elevated capital expenditure” through 2029, while Morningstar placed a $780 billion fair-value estimate on the company, focused on its core rocket and Starlink businesses. That is less than half its peak market cap of over $2 trillion.