SpaceX stock sinks below its IPO price as Cathie Wood adds $51 million

SpaceX arrived at the public markets as the most expensive company ever to list without a profit. At $1.6 trillion, its opening valuation made Apple look like a value play. The stock priced at $135, surged past $225, and has since given back nearly every dollar of that gain. At $124, it now trades below the price anyone paid on listing day.

That sequence tells a specific story about how markets price a bet built entirely on future earnings. SpaceX is not a startup. It is the company that reinvented rocket launches, holds near-monopoly positioning on government orbital contracts, and through its Starlink division has reached tens of millions of satellite broadband subscribers. Investors priced all of that — and the earnings it has not yet produced — into a $1.6 trillion valuation before a single quarterly report existed.

A buyer at the post-IPO high of $225 is sitting on a 45% loss inside two months. But the more telling number is the price-to-sales ratio the market assigned at listing: 65.5, compared to Apple’s 11 and Amazon‘s 3.7. To justify that multiple, SpaceX would need to grow revenue faster than any comparable company and eventually produce profits the market currently has no evidence to model.

The operational news has not helped. A Starship test flight was postponed after engine problems were discovered, and the stock dropped more than 5% on that announcement alone. The company’s first quarterly earnings report is expected in early August. Until then, investors are pricing a narrative with no earnings anchor.

Into that uncertainty, Cathie Wood’s ARK Invest purchased $51 million in SpaceX shares. Wood built her reputation on buying Tesla in the years when its valuation looked disconnected from reality — a bet that ultimately proved correct. The question SpaceX investors now face is whether Wood is applying a proven pattern to a company that will eventually deliver, or whether she is extending a playbook built for a company that turned profitable to one with no demonstrated timeline for doing the same.

For the broader space economy, the SpaceX IPO was meant to open a new investment chapter across aerospace suppliers, satellite competitors, and NASA program partners. A sustained stock decline at this scale does not threaten the company’s operations — SpaceX generates revenue — but it changes the cost of capital and the terms on which rivals and partners calibrate their own bets on the sector.

SpaceX’s first quarterly earnings report arrives in early August. If revenue growth validates the trajectory, the current price will look like an entry point. If it does not, the distance between $225 and $124 has further to close.

Tags: SpaceX, ARK Invest, Cathie Wood, space industry, SPCX