SpaceX’s blistering start still faces key tests that will determine the stock’s true value
The SpaceX initial public offering was, by all accounts, a major success , and it has stayed red hot out of the gate. On Tuesday, its third day of trading, the stock peaked over $225 a share, before closing well off the highs at $201.68. For much of the day, Elon Musk’s rocket-and-AI company had a market capitalization larger than Amazon , which is worth $2.65 trillion. They finished the day roughly even. The question to ask now: Has the IPO and early trading revealed the true demand for SpaceX stock, or are we still in the honeymoon period, when it cannot be overvalued and do no wrong, before reality starts to settle in? That’s not to say anything about the company itself; only a fool would bet against Musk given his track record at Tesla . What SpaceX has managed to achieve since its founding over two decades ago is nothing short of legendary. The team is literally launching rockets and working on a fully reusable one, dubbed Starship, that could change the economics of the space industry. The company is placing satellites into low Earth orbit to deliver internet to the masses via its Starlink service. And, with its February acquisition of Musk’s xAI , the owner of social media site X and the Grok chatbot, SpaceX is also competing with the best AI companies in the world, while it develops plans to build data centers in space. It also announced a $60 billion deal for AI coding startup Cursor on Tuesday. However, just because a company is revolutionary does not mean that it is being properly valued, and therein lies the issue with SpaceX stock. We don’t actually know what this company is worth, and we more than likely won’t know that answer for several weeks to many months. As compelling as Musk’s five-to-10-year vision may be, timelines do matter. And, when it comes to an unproven technology like orbital data centers, timelines are not exactly certain. As it stands now, SpaceX is a company that makes very little money, requires a ton of cash to achieve its goals, and has issued total addressable market projections in the many trillions of dollars that some might call optimistic. SPCX mountain 2026-06-12 SpaceX performance since its June 12 debut The real issue is the lack of price discovery. While SpaceX stock has now been public for a few days, to say we’re seeing authentic price discovery is, well, a stretch. For starters, before the initial public offering, the company named its own price, at $135 per share, opting to essentially forgo the price discovery process we usually get with an IPO, during which bankers set a price range based on the signals and feedback they receive from investors on the buy-side. Then there are the changes to index-inclusion rules made by Nasdaq and FTSE Russell, which will allow SpaceX to enter their indexes at an accelerated pace compared with IPOs of yesteryear. The Nasdaq changed a few of its requirements that will make it easier for massive tech companies to join the popular Nasdaq 100 index shortly after their public debuts. This benefits not just SpaceX, but also potentially OpenAI and Anthropic, which are planning blockbuster IPOs of their own. Among the changes: the elimination of a minimum-float requirement, which previously dictated that at least 10% of the company’s stock, or “float,” must be freely traded to qualify for index inclusion. In its place, the Nasdaq adopted a calculation system that limits the weighting of low-float stocks — a designation that applies to SpaceX, which sold only roughly 5% of the company in the IPO. To be sure, the size of its float will increase over time as lock-up periods expire (lock-ups prevent insiders and early investors from selling stock for a given period of time, and SpaceX is using an unconventional lock-up schedule ). Arguably, Nasdaq’s most relevant change is to the so-called seasoning window for vetting new issues. Companies used to require up to a year of seasoning. But, SpaceX will only be seasoned for 15 days, making it eligible to join the Nasdaq 100 after just three trading weeks. For the FTSE Russell — which oversees the Russell 3000, 2000, and 1000 indexes, among others — inclusion eligibility now comes after just five trading days, instead of waiting for the next quarterly reconstitution. FTSE Russell also amended its 5% minimum free float requirement. The general argument in favor of the fast-track changes is that the indexes are supposed to reflect the broader stock market universe. The providers essentially argue they will fail to live up to that aim if they leave out massive companies that are now public. This is a predicament created, in large part, by startups staying private longer and debuting at much higher valuations than before. Notably, the company that oversees the S & P 500 opted not to change its inclusion rules. One requirement to join the S & P 500 is that a company is profitable in its latest quarter and on a trailing 12-month basis — a box that SpaceX cannot check right now, and it may take a while before it can check it. With the Nasdaq and FTSE Russell, the impact is the same: Funds that track their indexes that add SpaceX will need to buy shares of the company, with no price sensitivity. The result is that, right now, every active investor in the world knows they’ve got a few-week window to buy up shares before the stock enters widely owned passive index funds. Invesco’s exchange-traded fund tracking the Nasdaq 100, known as the QQQ , has almost $500 billion in assets under management . Bottom line SpaceX has yet to go through a real price discovery process. That will start once the index funds have completed their buys, and it will be put to the real test once lock-up periods start to expire in the coming months, which will bring more supply onto the market. As the size of SpaceX’s float increases, its adjusted weighting in the Nasdaq 100 will increase (in accordance with the aforementioned calculation system). This means there will be some forced index buying at the same time more supply comes onto the market. Perhaps that will help blunt some of the impact from the lock-up expiration, but only time will reveal how that push-pull tension is resolved. Anybody who wants to bet on the grand vision of Musk has the right to do so. He has understandably captured the imaginations of many. Jim Cramer said it best on Tuesday’s Morning Meeting: “This is what has captured the American mind.” However, it’s also important to understand that when it comes to the stock’s blistering start, there’s more than meets the eye. All the buying isn’t being done based on the fundamentals as they currently stand. We’re still a long way away from seeing SpaceX’s true value, and the journey is likely to contain more turbulence than these first three trading days. (Jim Cramer’s Charitable Trust is long AMZN. See here for a full list of the stocks.) As a subscriber to the CNBC Investing Club with Jim Cramer, you will receive a trade alert before Jim makes a trade. Jim waits 45 minutes after sending a trade alert before buying or selling a stock in his charitable trust’s portfolio. If Jim has talked about a stock on CNBC TV, he waits 72 hours after issuing the trade alert before executing the trade. 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