There are stock market corrections and there are stock market corrections that arrive within a month of a person becoming the world’s first trillionaire, and Elon Musk is experiencing the second kind, with SpaceX’s share price cut roughly in half from its record high of $225 as investors begin, per Raw Story’s confirmed reporting published this morning, to ask questions about the company’s future profitability that the IPO excitement did not require them to ask at $225 a share.
SpaceX went public at a record-breaking valuation that propelled Musk to trillionaire status, a designation that had never existed before, and it lasted approximately one month before the stock’s trajectory suggested the market had reconsidered. The halving from $225 to approximately $112 represents the specific sequence of events that Raw Story describes as “the glow is off” and which financial analysts describe as “price discovery,” which is the polite term for investors collectively deciding they paid too much. SpaceX remains a remarkable engineering company with functional rockets and a satellite internet business. It is worth approximately half of what it was worth a month ago.
The headwinds are specific. Musk’s political profile (he runs a social media platform that has become a partisan battleground, he served in a Trump administration advisory role that made him a boycott target for approximately half of all consumers, and he is simultaneously building Grok and xAI as a competitor to companies he is also invested in) has created a founder-brand liability that rocket companies do not typically manage. Tesla’s stock has also struggled since Musk’s involvement with DOGE sparked sustained consumer backlash. Investors who bought SpaceX at $225 were pricing in a future that did not include “founder is a recurring political controversy” as a quarterly earnings risk factor. It is now a quarterly earnings risk factor.
Musk has not addressed the stock decline publicly. He has posted approximately 40 things on X today, none of which are about SpaceX’s share price.
The trillionaire milestone was real. It lasted a month. The math at $112 is different.
When the world’s first trillionaire watches his flagship company lose half its value within a month of the milestone and spends the morning posting about other things, what exactly was the trillion for?
Sources
Raw Story: Elon Musk’s ‘honeymoon is over’ as investors wise up
