Histoire
juillet 17, 2026
SpaceX’s $1 Trillion Comedown Meets a Scrubbed ‘History-Making’ Starship Flight
SpaceX's stock price has fallen to its $135 initial public offering price for the first time since its market debut in June. The decline in the AI and space conglomerate's valuation comes as the company prepares for its next Starship test launch.
SpaceX’s first post-IPO Starship test was meant to showcase a new era of reusable super-rockets; instead, it collided with an already brutal comedown in the company’s trillion‑dollar valuation.
In mid-June, SpaceX went public at $135 a share, briefly soaring above $200 and touching valuations comparable to Amazon and Microsoft before sliding almost every week as the tiny 4% public float amplified volatility.1 By July 15, a sell-off had “wiped $1tn from Elon Musk’s rocket group,” with the stock trading below its IPO price for the first time since listing.2
That same day, tech outlets framed the retreat as a sign that investors were sobering up about Musk’s expansive AI-and-space vision. TechCrunch noted SpaceX’s shares had fallen back to “just above $135,” after an early surge that once briefly gave it a valuation rivaling Big Tech, and warned that a “fly, fail, fix” Starship test would be an early trial of the stock’s durability.1
Inside the company, however, the focus was on Flight 13. On July 15, Musk reassured followers that “Starship still tracking to fly tomorrow,” amplifying a commentator’s awe that it was “absolutely wild that this thing was built by humans.”
3 The next day he highlighted a SpaceX video series “Critical Path” to help the public “understand more about Starship,” underscoring the vehicle’s role as the “world’s most powerful and fully reusable rocket.”4
As launch day unfolded on July 16, Musk hyped the schedule — “Starship launch window opens at 5:45pm Texas time”5 — while retweeting posts about “Stacking Starship for Flight 13” and claims it was “once again going to make history.”6 But when the countdown reached zero just before 7pm ET, the attempt “fizzled out.”7
“Some of the engines didn’t start, triggering an automatic launch abort,” Musk acknowledged, adding that propellant was being offloaded and that the “next launch attempt hopefully in a few days.”8 The aborted flight, arriving only hours after SpaceX closed below $135, sharpened the contrast between Musk’s long-term engineering optimism and markets newly wary of his “otherworldly promises” — a tension that will now hang over every future Starship countdown.1