A company that lost $4.9 billion last year just briefly became worth more than Amazon.
SpaceX hit a $2.9 trillion valuation Tuesday before pulling back, passing Amazon and nearly catching Microsoft. The peak briefly ranked it as the world's fifth-most valuable company.
Two things landed at once. The company announced a $60 billion all-stock deal to buy AI coding startup Cursor, while options trading on its shares opened for the first time - giving traders a new way to bet on price moves without owning the stock.
Shares had already jumped 20% on Monday, and the Cursor news plus the options launch pushed the valuation up to that $2.9 trillion peak before it settled back down.
All told, since going public Friday, SpaceX has added roughly $1 trillion to its market cap, with the IPO itself raising nearly $86 billion in fresh cash for Musk's company - the biggest stock-market debut on record.
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Only 4% of SpaceX shares are actually available to trade. That works out to about 555 million shares on the public market, with the rest locked up by Musk, employees, and early backers.
This kind of setup isn't unique to SpaceX. Newly public stocks with small floats often see wild price swings as a small pool of shares meets heavy demand.
It's especially common in high-profile IPOs where retail interest runs high and shares are tightly held.
On Tuesday alone, more than 300 million of those shares changed hands - over half the float in a single session. When supply is that thin, every buy order moves the price more than it would for a stock with billions of shares trading freely.
That's how a company with $4.9 billion in losses on $18.7 billion in revenue can briefly outrank Amazon, which booked $78 billion in profit on $717 billion in sales last year.
Put differently, that's more than 150 times SpaceX's annual revenue. Amazon trades closer to 3 times sales, with profits behind the number.
The bull case is AI. SpaceX signed new compute leasing deals with Anthropic and Google, letting them rent SpaceX's computing power.
On top of that, the Cursor acquisition adds a working AI product to the lineup once it closes in the third quarter.
The catch: the Anthropic and Google deals aren't binding yet, and SpaceX recently tore down its own AI division - the old xAI - to rebuild it "from the foundations up," in Musk's words.
Both factors leave a trillion-dollar valuation riding on promises that haven't fully closed. With only 4% of the stock trading, the next big move could come from a single headline - in either direction.
Thin floats cut both ways.
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