I’ve gotten more questions about a single stock in the past week than I have in a long time, so let me get ahead of the rest of them. SpaceX went public on June 12, and the reaction has been loud enough that you’ve probably seen the headlines whether you were looking for them or not.

I’m not going to tell you whether to buy it, sell it, or ignore it. That’s a conversation for your specific situation, and a blog post is the wrong place for it. What I can do is lay out what happened, what serious people on each side are saying, and a few things the headlines are glossing over.

SpaceX priced its IPO at $135 a share and started trading on the Nasdaq under the ticker SPCX. It raised $75 billion at pricing, a figure that climbed to $85.7 billion once underwriters exercised their overallotment option a few days later. Either number makes it the largest IPO in history by a wide margin. The previous record holder, Saudi Aramco, raised about $29 billion in 2019.

The stock did what hot IPOs do. It closed its first day just under $161, then kept climbing for two more sessions, touching nearly $226 a share at its high before its first down day pulled it back toward $190. Along the way it passed Amazon in total market value and now ranks among the five most valuable public companies in the country, worth around $2.5 trillion. That is a striking place for a business that was private until last week.

On the strength of that move, Elon Musk became, on paper, the first trillionaire in history. He owns roughly 42% of the company, so a valuation in the trillions does a lot of work for one person’s net worth.

Those are the facts, and they’re historic. The interesting part is what they mean, and that’s where reasonable, informed people disagree sharply.

The people making this case are not lightweights. Ron Baron, who has held SpaceX privately since 2017 and watched a $2 billion stake grow to around $12 billion, says flatly that he expects it to become the largest, most profitable company on the planet. Cathie Wood’s ARK holds it as the largest position in its venture fund and bought more on IPO day. Early backers like Fidelity and Founders Fund are sitting on some of the largest paper gains in venture history. Musk himself has floated $1 trillion in annual revenue by 2030, up from $18.7 billion in 2025.

But notice what the case comes down to. It’s a bet on the founder and a long-term story, not on what the company earns today. Bulls will tell you, fairly, that you can’t value a company like this on current numbers, because it’s spending today to own tomorrow. Betting against Musk’s ability to build industry-defining companies has been a losing trade for two decades. Whether that future is worth $2.5 trillion today is the open question.

The most useful voice here is Aswath Damodaran, the NYU professor known as the “Dean of Valuation” because he publishes his spreadsheets and isn’t given to hype in either direction. After working through the prospectus, he put SpaceX’s equity value near $1.3 trillion and said he would sit the IPO out. He called the valuation “driven by narrative” and pushed back hard on the company’s claims about the size of its AI opportunity. Here’s what makes that land: Damodaran is the optimistic end of the skeptics, and his number is still only half of where the stock trades today.

Below him, Morningstar puts fair value at $63 a share, or about $780 billion, and gets there only after crediting the company for bullish assumptions like a rapidly reusable Starship and working data centers in space. Those are engineering problems it doesn’t expect solved before 2028. CFRA became the first major Wall Street firm to put a Sell rating on the stock. Other skeptics have pointed out that it is priced at one of the richest sales multiples in market history.

Here’s the framing I keep coming back to, and it’s arithmetic, not opinion. SpaceX priced its IPO between $1.75 and $1.8 trillion, a number plenty of independent analysts already considered aggressive. The stock then blew past that, and today the whole company is valued at around $2.5 trillion. Meanwhile the most generous credible outside valuation, Damodaran’s, comes in around $1.3 trillion, and Morningstar’s sits under $800 billion.

So the market is pricing SpaceX above the IPO price that the skeptics already called too high. That doesn’t make them right. Markets price the future, and the future here could be enormous. But it does mean today’s buyer is paying for a great deal of that future in advance, with very little room for disappointment.

There’s one more thing to understand, and it comes from an unlikely source. CNBC’s Jim Cramer called SpaceX a “meme stock.”

I know how that lands. Cramer is so unreliable as a stock-picker that betting against him became an actual product: a few years back, someone launched the “Inverse Cramer” ETF to do the literal opposite of his on-air calls. It didn’t last, which tells you how messy this game is, but the reputation is earned. When Cramer turns bearish, the reflex is to assume the thing is about to rip. So why am I citing him?

Because this isn’t that kind of call. The inverse-Cramer trade works when he’s making a prediction, when the call comes down to taste, gut, or a guess about direction. Those are the ones that age badly. This time he isn’t predicting anything. He’s describing the mechanics of how the stock trades: retail piling in, no large sellers to absorb the buying, the price lurching ten points in a couple of hours on no news. Nearly a million call options changed hands on the first day they were listed.

That’s the distinction that counts. You don’t have to trust Cramer’s judgment to weigh this, because he isn’t asking you to. The order flow, the options volume, and the gap between price and any sober estimate of value are all things you can check yourself. He isn’t forecasting where the stock goes. He’s pointing at how it’s getting there. And for what it’s worth, he also says he likes the company and called the stock a “monster,” so this isn’t a crash call.

That last point is the crux. A stock can trade well above its fundamental value for a long stretch when momentum, not analysis, sets the price, right up until it doesn’t. The force that carries it up fast is the force that carries it down fast. The investor who thinks they bought a sober blue-chip and the investor riding a momentum wave own the exact same stock at the exact same price. They are not holding the same risk.

Nothing here is a recommendation, and I’m being deliberate about that. What I’d offer instead are the questions I’d want any investor to be able to answer before acting on a stock generating this much heat.

Do you understand what you’d be buying, or are you buying because it’s going up? Could you sit calmly through a 50% drop, given that a name that ran up this fast can fall just as fast? Is the position small enough that being wrong is survivable and being right still matters? And is this a decision that fits the plan we’ve built, or one that’s happening to the plan?

The largest IPO in history made the richest man in history richer, on a stock trading on a mix of real promise and pure hype. Both are true at once. The bull case is credible, and serious people are making it. So is the bear case. The momentum is its own force, and right now it’s doing more of the work than either argument.

If you’re thinking about this for your own portfolio, let’s talk it through against your situation: your goals, your timeline, what you already own, and how much risk this would really add. That’s the conversation worth having, and it’s a different one from “is the stock going up.”

Sources

Figures and quotes below are current as of June 18, 2026. SPCX is trading with significant volatility, so price and market-cap figures move intraday.

IPO terms, pricing, and trading history

• SpaceX, “Announces Pricing of Initial Public Offering.” Official pricing announcement: $135 per share, 555,555,555 shares, ticker SPCX, June 12 trading. (content.spacex.com)
• Reuters / Capital.com, SpaceX IPO terms: $135, $75B raise, $1.75T valuation, largest IPO in history. (capital.com/en-int/learn/ipo/spacex-ipo)
• CNBC / Reuters, SpaceX IPO greenshoe overallotment exercised June 15: total proceeds rose to $85.7 billion from the initial $75 billion (underwriters bought an additional 83.3 million shares). (cnbc.com; reuters.com)
• Fox Business, “Elon Musk becomes world’s first trillionaire following SpaceX IPO.” Raised $75B, surpassed Saudi Aramco’s 2019 record, first trillionaire. (foxbusiness.com)
• CBS News, “Elon Musk becomes the world’s first trillionaire.” First trillionaire, about $1.14T net worth at first-day close, about 42% ownership. (cbsnews.com)
• Bloomberg, “Elon Musk Hits $1 Trillion Net Worth as SpaceX IPO Breaks Records.” (bloomberg.com)

Current price, market cap, and the peak

• Robinhood / CoinGecko / Investing.com, SPCX quote: low-$200s price, near $2.6T market cap, 52-week range $135 to $225.64. (robinhood.com/us/en/stocks/SPCX)
• Fox Business, SPCX quote: SpaceX moved past Amazon’s $2.66 trillion market value on Tuesday. (foxbusiness.com)
• TradingView / Stockanalysis, SPCX: briefly topped Microsoft and Amazon in market cap, then settled as the fifth-most-valuable U.S. company. (tradingview.com/symbols/NASDAQ-SPCX; stockanalysis.com/stocks/spcx)
• Stocktwits, “SPCX Stock Jumps Overnight, Morningstar.” Roughly $2.642T market cap, trades above 130 times trailing revenue, nearly 1 million call options on the first day of options trading. (stocktwits.com)

Financials (from the S-1 prospectus)

• Via Satellite, “SpaceX’s IPO Filing Gives First Look Into Company’s Financials.” $18.7B 2025 revenue, $4.9B net loss, Starlink as largest revenue driver, “controlled company” status. (satellitetoday.com)
• Morningstar, “6 Charts on SpaceX’s Pre-IPO Financials.” $18B revenue, $4.9B net loss, $6.58B EBITDA. (morningstar.com)
• Yahoo Finance, “SpaceX files IPO prospectus.” Q1 2026 segment detail, Starlink/Connectivity $11.39B 2025 revenue and operating profit. (finance.yahoo.com)
• CNBC, “SpaceX IPO live updates.” Latest-quarter net loss of $4.28B. (cnbc.com)

Valuation: the skeptics

• Moneywise, “NYU’s ‘dean of valuation’ Aswath Damodaran says SpaceX is worth $1.3 trillion.” Damodaran near $1.3T, AI total-addressable-market critique, Morningstar near $780B, Ed Elson’s sales-multiple comparison. (moneywise.com)
• Benzinga, “Why One Of Wall Street’s Most Respected Valuation Experts Is Passing On Elon Musk’s SpaceX.” Damodaran won’t participate, “driven by narrative,” $1.25 to $1.35 trillion, governance concerns. (benzinga.com)
• Aswath Damodaran, “Revisiting the SpaceX Valuation: A Post-Prospectus Update.” His published model. (aswathdamodaran.substack.com)
• Stocktwits / Insider Monkey, Morningstar $63 fair value and scenario assumptions: reusable Starship, orbital data centers, not expected before 2028. (stocktwits.com; insidermonkey.com)
• Benzinga, “SpaceX’s First Wall Street Bear Just Placed A Sell Rating.” CFRA, first major Sell. (benzinga.com)

Valuation: the bulls

• CNBC, “From startup to $1.8 trillion: the investors who took a chance on SpaceX.” Ron Baron, Cathie Wood/ARK, Fidelity, Founders Fund as major beneficiaries. (cnbc.com)
• BigGo Finance / Motley Fool, Ron Baron and Cathie Wood positions. Baron’s $2B stake grown to around $12B, “largest, most profitable company on the planet,” ARK near 11.4% and largest fund position, Wood’s IPO-day buying. (finance.biggo.com; fool.com)
• Benzinga, “Bill Ackman, Chamath Palihapitiya React To SpaceX’s $60 Billion Cursor Acquisition.” Ackman on dilution and valuation as currency. (benzinga.com)

The Cursor acquisition, bitcoin, governance

• AOL / CNN, SpaceX and Anysphere (Cursor), $60B all-stock acquisition. (aol.com; cnn.com/markets/stocks/SPCX)
• Seeking Alpha / WEEX, SpaceX holds 18,712 bitcoin per the S-1. (seekingalpha.com)
• BitMEX, “SpaceX IPO Guide: S-1 Breakdown.” About 42% equity, about 85% voting control, Q1 2026 net loss. (bitmex.com/blog/spacex-ipo-guide)

Cramer and the “Inverse Cramer” reputation

• TheStreet / Yahoo Finance, “Jim Cramer has blunt response to SpaceX stock surge.” Meme-stock comments, “ten points in a couple of hours,” says he likes the stock. (thestreet.com; finance.yahoo.com)
• Finbold / Cryptonews, “Jim Cramer calls SpaceX stock a ‘Monster’ at $200.” (cryptonews.net)
• EBC Financial Group / Bitget / Nasdaq, the Inverse Cramer Tracker ETF (SJIM), launched by Tuttle Capital in 2023 and liquidated February 2024. (ebc.com; bitget.com)

Lock-up and share supply

StockAlarm, “SPCX Lock-Up Expiration Dates.” A reading of SpaceX’s 424B4 filing: lock-up near 180 days, first selling window after Q2 earnings, Musk’s shares restricted into June 2027. Note: these specifics are a third-party reading of the prospectus, so confirm against the 424B4 directly before citing exact dates publicly. (pro.stockalarm.io)

Disclosures

This material is provided for informational and educational purposes only and should not be construed as individualized investment, tax, or legal advice. The opinions expressed are those of Strategic Advisory Partners as of the date published and are subject to change without notice. All investing involves risk, including the possible loss of principal.

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