By mid-morning on Tuesday, trading had carried SpaceX's market value to a peak of $2.94 trillion. That was enough to edge past Microsoft's $2.93 trillion and, for a few minutes, make Elon Musk's rocket builder the fourth-most-valuable company in the United States. It didn't hold. By the close the shares had cooled to $2.65 trillion, still a hair above Amazon's roughly $2.64 trillion and, as CNBC reported, good enough to keep Jeff Bezos's empire in the rear-view mirror. The stock finished up about 4%, a modest follow-on to Monday's 20% jump in its first full day of trading.
Stack the milestones together and the speed of it starts to feel improbable. SpaceX priced its initial public offering at $135 a share on Friday, the largest market debut on record, raising somewhere in the region of $85.7 billion by the BBC's count. Since then the shares have climbed roughly 62% off that offer price, to around $209. Put another way: SpaceX's stock has gained more in five trading days than Amazon's has in five years. The retailer is up about 45% over that longer stretch.
The gap between price and proof
The market-cap leaderboard tells one story. The income statement tells another one entirely. Amazon booked $30.3 billion in profit in the first quarter of 2026 and racked up something like $716.9 billion in sales last year. SpaceX lost $4.3 billion in the first quarter and posted $18.67 billion in revenue for all of 2025, against a net loss of $4.9 billion. Across 2025 and the part of 2026 reported so far, the company has burned through more than $9 billion, most of it on AI and infrastructure, according to the BBC.
So investors aren't buying earnings. They're buying a forecast. Musk posted on X over the weekend that SpaceX could approach $1 trillion in annual revenue by 2030, a figure that would require the business to grow more than fiftyfold in five years. It is the kind of projection that lands somewhere between audacious and unfalsifiable, and plenty of people on Wall Street are treating it as the latter. CFRA initiated coverage on Friday with a bearish stance, assigning a price target of $115, nearly 29% below where the stock closed that day, and flagging the company's voracious appetite for capital, its stretched valuation, and a growth plan the firm described as extremely ambitious.
There's a structural quirk worth flagging too. Only about 4% of SpaceX shares trade freely right now, so a small float is doing a lot of the price discovery. Dan Sheehan of Telos Wealth Advisors warned that smaller buyers could be paying a premium that thins out later, once big institutional holders are free to sell. Eileen Burbidge, the venture capitalist, told the BBC that much of the buying looks like a bet on Musk himself: a well-packaged chance to back his ambitions, more than a read on the fundamentals. That sounds about right. When a company's headline number is a 2030 revenue tweet, you are underwriting the man's conviction as much as the rockets.
A rocket company buying a coding tool
The day's other news fed the same fire. SpaceX said Tuesday it will acquire Anysphere, the parent of the AI coding assistant Cursor, for $60 billion. The deal is expected to close by the end of September, with Cursor's shareholders paid in SpaceX stock. The two have been linked since April, when SpaceX secured an option either to buy the startup outright or pay $10 billion for joint work. Cursor counts Stripe, Adobe and Nvidia among its customers; Nvidia chief Jensen Huang has called it his favorite enterprise AI service. The purchase pulls SpaceX deeper into a fight with OpenAI and Anthropic, both of which sell coding tools of their own.
This is, remember, a company founded in 2002 to build reusable rockets. It still dominates launch and runs the Starlink satellite network. But after Musk folded his AI venture xAI into SpaceX in February, having earlier merged xAI with his social platform X, the corporate identity has gotten harder to pin down. Rockets, satellites, a chatbot, now a coding agent, plus floated plans for data centers in orbit. The list keeps growing.
Steve Westly, a former Tesla board member, offered the line that may matter most. He told CNBC that SpaceX's backers will turn impatient within "three or four quarters" if the growth targets in the S-1 don't start materializing. The IPO made Musk the world's first trillionaire and minted millionaires out of more than 4,400 current and former staff. None of that is the same as a profit. What investors who piled in this week are really watching for is the first quarter when the revenue line begins to bend toward Musk's promise. The clock, by Westly's reckoning, has already started.