SpaceX, the Largest IPO Ever, Fell Below Its Offer Price in Seven Weeks

On the morning of June 12, 2026, SpaceX shares began trading at $135. At that price the company raised roughly $75 billion — the largest IPO ever completed. The opening print put market capitalization close to $1.8 trillion, and the stock finished its first session at $161, up 19%.

Four trading days later, on June 16, the shares traded as high as $225.64 intraday. That was 67% above the offer price, and for a brief stretch SpaceX was worth more than Amazon and more than Microsoft.

By the end of July the same stock was below $110.

This piece is not an argument about whether SpaceX is a good company or a bad one. It is about the fact that a stock lost more than half its value in seven weeks while almost nothing about the underlying business changed over those same seven weeks.

How an Offer Price Is Set

An IPO price is not discovered in the market. The company and its underwriters set it after weeks of conversations with institutional investors, gauging demand and assembling an order book. The objective is twofold and self-contradictory: the issuer wants to raise as much capital as possible, while the banks want a stock that trades up on day one — because a broken deal means the institutions they allocated shares to were handed damaged goods.

That tension is why the offer price is usually left deliberately a little cheap. A 15% to 20% gain on the first day is treated as a well-executed deal, not as a mispricing.

Why the Offering Itself Was So Large

Seventy-five billion dollars is an enormous amount to pull out of the market in a single transaction. But the free float — the share of the company that actually begins circulating — is typically small in deals of this kind. Against a $1.8 trillion valuation, $75 billion is roughly 4% of the equity.

That has a direct and widely overlooked consequence for price: when the float is thin, a buy order of a given size moves the stock much further than it otherwise would. More detail here: Market Cap, Free Float and Stock Splits

The Mechanism: Small Float, Large Swings

Put numbers on it.

That is the technical answer to why IPOs move so violently in their first weeks. The company does not change. The ground the price stands on is thin.

There is a second factor layered on top. In the early days there is no shared view of what the stock is worth. There is no year of trading history, no four quarters of comparable results, no analyst consensus band that participants can anchor to. The price forms in a window where narrative substitutes for conviction.

What Actually Happened

The July decline was not specific to SpaceX. The same weeks brought a sharp sell-off across artificial intelligence and semiconductor names; anything priced on a high multiple pulled back at once.

The path from the high to the end of July fits in a single frame.

What explains the gap is not the company. It is the thinness of the ground that price was standing on.

In a company priced by 4% of its equity, the other 96% has not yet taken the stage.

What the Sell Side Said

CFRA initiated coverage with a sell rating and a 12-month price target of $115 — below the offer price itself. The rationale rested on three points: an unusually aggressive growth plan, an already demanding valuation, and capital intensity.

That last item matters more than usual here. Launching rockets, building out a satellite network and running factories is not like selling software: growth requires continuous, heavy investment. In businesses like this, profit arrives well behind revenue growth, and free cash flow can stay negative through years of expansion.

How Much of the July Decline Belongs to the Company

When a stock halves in seven weeks, the first instinct is to assume something broke. In this case nothing did. Over the same period there was no earnings release, no cancelled contract, no operational announcement that would justify a rerating of the business.

Part of the decline came from the market as a whole — in July every richly valued technology name pulled back. The rest was the first weeks' enthusiasm draining away. The $225 print was produced by a thin order book, not by a settled view of value, and when the mechanics normalized the price normalized with them.

Making that distinction matters, because the two causes prompt different questions. A company-specific decline raises the question of whether the thesis has broken. A structural one raises a different question: what was the price actually reflecting in the first place?

Two Readings

Both columns can be true at the same time. What separates them is the time horizon over which each turns out to be right.

The Lock-Up Has Not Expired Yet

In an IPO, shares held by founders and employees typically cannot be sold for 90 to 180 days. When that window closes, the number of freely tradable shares jumps and supply pressure follows.

At the time of writing, SpaceX's lock-up had not yet expired. The thin base that sets the price is still thin — and it will thicken in the months ahead. On its own that is not a directional forecast, but it is a date worth marking on the calendar.

Chart

The chart below is live: it does not show the June-to-July window described above, but where the stock stands today.

What Changes When the Lock-Up Expires

Lock-up expiration does not mean a wave of selling. It means the number of tradable shares increases. These are different things and they are routinely confused.

As the float grows, the arithmetic above starts working in reverse: an order of the same size moves the price less, because the book is deeper. So lock-up expiry creates supply pressure in the short run while calming the price over the medium term.

That is why, for a recently listed company, the date to mark alongside the first earnings report is the day the lock-up ends. Together, the two form the threshold at which price moves from narrative to conviction.

The Lesson: A New Stock's Price Is Not a Verdict

The number that appears when a company goes public is not the market's conclusion about what the business is worth. The price you see in the first weeks is a range produced in a thin order book, where short-horizon buyers and sellers meet and no settled view yet exists.

The subject here happened to be SpaceX, but the lesson applies to every IPO. Neither a first day that rises nor a seventh week that falls below the offer price answers the question of what the company is actually worth.

For broader context: What Is a Stock? and Liquidity and Spreads

This article draws on reporting from CNBC, CNN Business and Seeking Alpha. Price and date details are compiled from publicly available news sources.