The market-capitalization table on the Nasdaq floor changed twice in the space of an afternoon. Around midday on Tuesday, June 16, SpaceX shares touched $225.64, briefly making the rocket company the fourth-largest corporation in the United States. By the close, the stock had settled at $201.68, up 4.8 percent on the day, and the distinction that held was different but no less remarkable: with a market value of about $2.65 trillion, SpaceX had overtaken Amazon.
The company needed four trading days to get there. SpaceX listed on June 12 at $135 a share, raising $75 billion in the largest initial public offering in history and valuing the company at $1.77 trillion. The stock rose nearly 19 percent on its first day, climbed again on Monday, and kept going. On Tuesday it completed its climb past Amazon, the e-commerce giant that has traded publicly for three decades. In the process it joined Apple, Microsoft, and Nvidia as the only technology companies worth more than $2.5 trillion.
The day’s other headline was the options debut. SpaceX options began trading Tuesday, and the volume was unlike anything the market has seen for a newly listed company. More than 500,000 contracts changed hands in the first hour, and more than a million by early afternoon, according to Trade Alert data. By the end of the day, roughly 1.8 million contracts had traded, a record for a first session, according to Reuters.
The options market added a new layer of complexity to a stock that was already moving in ways that made veteran traders uncomfortable. “The tail looks dangerous,” one derivatives strategist said, a warning that the combination of a tiny float and heavy speculation can produce sharp moves in either direction. The public float at listing was just 4.2 percent of the company, an unusually small share that amplified every wave of buying. Market makers hedging their options books had no choice but to trade the stock itself, feeding the volatility they were trying to manage. “If you’re a market maker, you can’t hedge SpaceX with anything other than SpaceX,” one trader noted.
Turnover in SpaceX shares reached $52 billion on Tuesday, the highest of any large U.S.-listed company that day, even as the broader technology market slumped around it. The semiconductor index fell 3 percent and the Nasdaq Composite slipped 0.5 percent, a divergence that some analysts read as a rotation: investors selling chip stocks to buy SpaceX, pulling liquidity out of one crowded trade to feed another. The listing has also forced passive funds to buy. SpaceX entered the S&P 500 shortly after its debut, triggering mandatory purchases by index-tracking funds and adding a mechanical bid to an already crowded trade.
Retail investors have been central to the move, and none more so than in South Korea. Korean individual investors net bought about $796 million of SpaceX stock on the first day of trading alone, according to local brokerage data, making the IPO one of the most popular foreign listings ever among Korean retail traders. The enthusiasm has a price: investors who bought near the intraday peak of $225 were sitting on paper losses of roughly 10 percent within hours. Brokerages reported heavy margin borrowing to fund SpaceX purchases in the first sessions, a pattern regulators in both markets are watching.
The valuation defies conventional metrics. SpaceX reported revenue of $18.7 billion in 2025 and a loss of about $4.9 billion, after combining with the money-losing AI startup xAI. That puts its price-to-sales ratio near 142 times, compared with roughly 20 times trailing revenue for Nvidia, the most valuable company in the United States. Amazon, whose market value SpaceX just passed, trades at about 3.7 times sales. By any standard measure of current earnings, the stock is expensive; the debate is whether the measures apply.
The bull case rests on the convergence of rockets, satellites, and AI under one roof. The satellite internet unit, Starlink, is profitable and cash-generative, the one consistently profitable segment in Musk’s empire, while the rocket business and the AI data center buildout consume capital. Investors are pricing the possibility that Starlink’s cash flow, SpaceX’s near-monopoly on heavy launch, and xAI’s technology compound into something no single company has assembled before. The company’s $60 billion deal to acquire the AI coding startup Cursor, reported this week, added a new line to that story.
The skeptics point to the float, the multiple, and the mechanics. A stock that rises 60 percent in four days on 4.2 percent of shares available for trading is a stock whose price is set at the margin, and margins can reverse. The options market, with its record first-day volume, has added a new source of pressure: as contracts expire, hedging flows will push the stock in ways that have little to do with the underlying business. The first earnings report as a public company, due within months, will give investors the first look at whether the growth story carries profit with it.
For now, the company sits just behind Apple, Microsoft, and Nvidia in the global rankings of the most valuable corporations. It got there in four sessions. The question, as the options strategists noted, is what happens when the tail stops wagging.
