SpaceX opened Monday down more than 4% in premarket trading, extending a two-session selloff that has seen the stock decline after touching an all-time high of $225.64 on June 16, four days after its debut. The IPO priced at $135. The debut close was $161.11. The peak was $225.64. Monday’s premarket of approximately $185 leaves SPCX still up 37% from its offering price, which means the stock is simultaneously in a material correction from its peak and dramatically above where institutional investors bought in. That dual truth is what NewsTrackerToday picks up as the analytical frame for the first week of trading: a selloff that looks sharp in percentage terms since the high is still a strong first-week performance by any conventional IPO metric.
The mechanics of the current selling are worth separating from the valuation debate. SpaceX’s market capitalization briefly surpassed Amazon and came within striking distance of Microsoft on June 13, one full trading day after the debut. The stock then fell 5% on Wednesday and 3.6% on Thursday before the Juneteenth holiday paused trading on Friday. Some of that selling traces to profit-taking by investors who received allocations in the IPO at $135 and chose to exit into strength. Some of it traces to portfolio managers rotating out of space-adjacent stocks to fund SPCX positions. And some of it reflects the valuation debate: CFRA initiated coverage with a sell rating and a $115 price target, below the IPO price, citing extremely ambitious growth strategy and elevated expectations. Morningstar’s fair value estimate remains $63 per share.
Liam Anderson on the price dynamics: “IPO at $135. High at $225. Now at $185. None of those numbers are wrong. They’re all real prices at different points in the first week of trading a stock with a tight float, enormous retail interest, and one of the most debated valuations in market history. The selloff from $225 is normal. The $185 level is still 37% above what Goldman and Morgan Stanley priced it at ten days ago.” The Nasdaq-100 inclusion deadline adds a structural dimension that is worth watching closely, and it is what NewsTrackerToday notes as the mechanics that will create its own buying wave: Nasdaq revised its index methodology in March 2026 to allow any company in the top 40 by market cap to join the Nasdaq-100 within 15 trading days, and SpaceX qualifies, putting inclusion around July 6. The forced passive buying from QQQ and other Nasdaq-100 trackers is estimated at $22 to $27 billion by market structure analysts.
Isabella Moretti examines what follows that buying wave: “The $22 to $27 billion in passive index buying around July 6 is mechanical, not discretionary. It happens regardless of the valuation debate. Index funds tracking the Nasdaq-100 have no opinion on whether SpaceX is worth $63 or $225. They buy because it is in the index. That creates a price floor around the inclusion date. After the inclusion buying completes, the next structural event is the December 2026 insider lock-up expiration, when early employees who have been waiting for this liquidity event can finally sell. The space between July 6 inclusion buying and December lock-up expiration is the window in which the stock trades on sentiment and incremental information rather than mechanical flows.”
The valuation argument has not changed since the IPO. Morningstar’s fair value of $63 per share is based on what SpaceX already earns, primarily through Starlink’s $11.4 billion in 2025 revenue and $4.4 billion in operating income. The market is paying above that for the call option on orbital data centers, Terafab, Starship commercial payload services, and the xAI integration. At $185, the call option premium is $122 per share. At $225 last Tuesday, it was $162 per share. The premium has compressed but not collapsed, and the question of whether the underlying engineering milestones materialize fast enough to sustain any premium at all is what News Tracker Today sits with as the number that resists resolution by trading data alone.
The shift that the first week of SPCX trading registers is not that the IPO was a disappointment – it clearly was not – but that the market has begun the process of separating the launch enthusiasm from the ongoing fundamental debate. A stock that opens at $161 and reaches $225 in four days before pulling back to $185 is performing exactly as high-anticipation IPOs typically do: the initial float is narrow, retail and institutional FOMO drives an overshoot, and rational repricing follows. What SpaceX’s first week marks, and what NewsTrackerToday marks as the structural observation worth carrying into Q3, is that the post-IPO trading environment is now the actual price discovery process that the $85.7 billion offering itself could not complete.
