"Repricing the Fairy Tales": How SpaceX Could Harm Other Mega-IPOs—and Itself
Elon Musk's company's shares have fallen by more than 20% over the past three days — analysts consider a "fundamental reassessment" of the market in the coming year
Analysts warn that the situation with SpaceX poses risks for other companies waiting to go public. Photo: SpaceX / X.com
SpaceX shares plummeted by more than 16% on June 22, and over the past three trading days alone, its stock price has fallen by more than 23%. In premarket trading on June 23, the stock was already trading below its opening price on the first day of trading. According to analysts surveyed by Oninvest, the sharp correction in SpaceX’s stock will worsen market conditions in the foreseeable future for other large companies waiting in line for mega-IPOs.
An Expensive Lesson
SpaceX held its IPO at a price of $135 per share, and on June 22, the company announced its first-ever issuance of senior unsecured bonds for qualified investors.
SpaceX plans to raise a total of at least $20 billion in the debt market, according to Bloomberg: it will use the proceeds to refinance a bridge loan of roughly the same amount. This issuance could mark the start of a large-scale borrowing program to finance its AI projects, the agency reported. The company’s total long-term debt reached $29.1 billion as of the end of March 2026.
Following its IPO, the rating agencies S&P and Moody's assigned SpaceX investment-grade credit ratings—BBB and Baa1, respectively—which essentially means that the company can secure loans at lower interest rates.
On the day the upcoming stock offering was announced, SpaceX shares fell by more than 16%; on June 22, the stock closed at $154.6 per share. This is approximately 15% above the offering price. However, market participants believe that the stock price could fall over the next 12 months.
Kit Snyder, senior equity analyst at CFRA Research, has assigned SpaceX shares a “sell” rating with a price target of $115. Morningstar, meanwhile, estimates the fair value at around $63 per share.
Snyder was the first on Wall Street to assign SpaceX a “sell” rating. In an exclusive comment to Oninvest, he stated that he could not justify a market capitalization of more than $2 trillion (as of June 22). SpaceX’s price-to-earnings (P/E) ratio currently stands at 493.7x.
These numbers are fantasy numbers, basically. As an analyst I could not arrive at the numbers we are talking about.
The SpaceX IPO is “the year's marquee deal” trading with a "megagap" between a disciplined valuation and market price, said Harrison Rolfes, senior analyst for late-stage company research at PitchBook (a Morningstar subsidiary), in a comment to Oninvest. According to him, when the gap is that wide, the lesson usually gets taught. So the only question now is timing.
Snyder and Rolfes agree that the structure of the offering itself also raises concerns. Only 5% of SpaceX’s shares are currently in free float. However, under the terms of the IPO, the company implemented a phased lock-up period, during which holders of securities received through the offering are prohibited from selling them. Shortly after the publication of the second-quarter 2026 financial results, this period will end for approximately 20% of the shares held by insiders, and another 10% will be unlocked if the stock trades 30% above the IPO price on 5 out of 10 consecutive trading sessions prior to the financial report.
In addition, the lock-up periods will end 70, 90, 105, 120, and 135 days after the offering. Basically insiders could sell up to 44% of SpaceX’s shares by early September, increasing the current free-float by approximately 900%, according to calculations by 22V Research analyst Jeff Jacobson.
The expensive-lesson path opens if those earnings and lockup expiries hit a retail-heavy shareholder base before fundamentals catch up to price, forcing a repricing that spreads to the private names waiting behind it, Rolfes warns.
The company’s financial metrics also cause concerns. According to the IPO filing, SpaceX’s revenue in the first quarter of 2026 was $4.694 billion, its net loss was $4.27 billion, and its capital expenditures were approximately $10.1 billion. Free cash flow after investments was deeply negative, and Snyder warns that it may also be constrained by new bond debt in the future.
I'm worried that they're going to start spending recklessly because they have all this cash on hand.
According to his estimates, at the current rate of capital expenditures, SpaceX could spend the funds raised through the IPO in as little as 2–2.5 years.
Kit Snyder believes that the financial reports for the second and third quarters of 2026 will be a good indicator for investors.
The market will pay particular attention to the company’s AI segment, Snyder notes. He expects the AI segment’s revenue to grow tenfold by 2026—to approximately $30 billion. Last year, revenue for this segment totaled $3.2 billion, with an operating loss of $6.36 billion. In the first quarter of this year, the AI segment generated just $818 million in revenue. Snyder emphasizes that, for now, this part of SpaceX’s business is being propped up by two major contracts—one with Anthropic, which brings in $1.25 billion per month, and one with Google ($920 million per month). That's really their only proven revenue right now in that segment, they need to say that they're growing revenue outside of those contracts, Snyder adds.
"If they don't say all the right things on Q2 and Q3, I think people will realize that this company should not be valued the way it is. So maybe we should bring our expectations down, and the stock should come down a little bit too," Snyder warns.
The Domino Effect
Both analysts warn that the situation with SpaceX poses risks for other companies waiting in line for an IPO. First and foremost, the SpaceX’s stock market revaluation could affect Anthropic and OpenAI. Both companies filed confidential IPO applications in June. During their latest funding rounds, Anthropic was valued at $965 billion, and OpenAI at approximately $852 billion.
If SpaceX’s financial results for the coming quarters do not disappoint investors and analysts, then the window of opportunity for Anthropic and OpenAI will remain open, and the market will confirm its willingness to pay high multiples for AI stories, Snyder argues.
If I were OpenAI and Anthropic right now, I would be getting my S1 put together as fast as possible. They want to cash in on this excitement (about SpaceX). If they can get their IPOs before SpaceX potentially implodes, that would be best for them.
This might happen real quick, Snyder explains: the companies could potentially IPO 2 weeks later after the S1 submission.
If SpaceX reports weak financial results, however, its stock will be sharply revalued, and investors will inevitably tighten their requirements for all similar offerings: they will demand lower prices and greater transparency regarding plans to achieve profitability.
The "expensive lesson" case sits at the top of the size distribution, where price reflects aspiration rather than fundamentals. SpaceX is the cleanest example.
Rolfes clarifies: the lesson might be delivered as a quality-sorted repricing at the top of the cohort, not a 2000-style break. It doesn't generalize into a crash because the supply is small. Equity issuance in 2026 runs around $260 billion, roughly 1% of market cap, while buybacks alone are near $1.5 trillion. The market can absorb these numbers, nut it can't sustain paying frontier-scale prices for aspiration-stage cash flows. So the analyst expects bifurcation first, then a correction concentrated in the names priced on story. Rolfes estimates that this will take place within next 12 months.
Kit Snyder agrees with the sentiment: investors in the last two to three years have become completely numb to wildly high numbers.
