SpaceX briefly surpassed Amazon to become the world’s fifth-most valuable company and nearly surpassed Microsoft before the company’s shares halved those gains before markets closed on Tuesday.
The newly listed company’s shares are already up 20% on Monday, its first day of trading. Tuesday’s news that SpaceX was acquiring AI coding company Cursor and the start of options trading on SpaceX stock pushed the stock higher, sending its value soaring to $2.9 trillion before eventually stabilizing again.
This is despite the fact that SpaceX posted a loss of $4.9 billion on $18.7 billion in revenue last year, and despite Amazon reporting $78 billion in profit in 2025 and $717 billion in revenue in 2025. SpaceX recently added a new revenue stream in the form of compute leasing deals with Anthropic and Google, and will absorb Cursor’s revenue when those deals close in the third quarter.
Anthropic’s deal with Google is non-binding, but investors don’t seem to care either way. Elon Musk’s space and AI company has added about $1 trillion to its valuation since going public on Friday.
The deal gave SpaceX nearly $86 billion in new capital, largely fueled by the promise that it could create an AI business worth trillions of dollars. This is an absurd claim for a company that recently completely spun off its AI department.
SpaceX first revealed its collaboration with Cursor last April. At the time, Musk said his AI company xAI, now part of SpaceX, was “not built right to begin with” and was being rebuilt “from the ground up.” SpaceX is making the acquisition for $60 billion in company stock.
SpaceX’s historic IPO debuted at a valuation of about $1.7 trillion, and the deal raised nearly $86 billion for Musk’s company. SpaceX had only about 4% of its shares available for trading, which experts predicted would make the stock more vulnerable to sharp swings.
Traders exchanged more than 300 million SpaceX shares throughout the trading day, according to data from the Nasdaq stock exchange. That’s more than half of the 555 million shares available on the public market following the IPO.
Volatility continued into after-hours trading, causing SpaceX’s value to briefly surpass Amazon’s market cap for the second time before falling again.
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