SpaceX's first public-market lesson is a blunt one: investors will pay for Musk's ambition, but they're already pushing back when that ambition arrives with a $60 billion Cursor deal and a new $20 billion bond sale.
The world's largest IPO did not get much of a honeymoon. SpaceX listed on Nasdaq on June 12 at $135 a share, then became a public-market spectacle almost immediately. By June 16, MarketWatch reported, the stock had touched an intraday high of $225.64 and closed at a record $201.80. By Monday, June 22, it had fallen to $154.60.
That is still above the IPO price. Don't confuse that with calm. MarketWatch said Monday's drop alone erased $400.8 billion in market value, while the fall from the June 16 intraday high left the stock down 31.5%. If you bought the peak, you did not buy SpaceX's Mars story. You bought the most expensive few days of enthusiasm in the market.
The company gave investors plenty to digest at once. SpaceX has agreed to acquire Cursor maker Anysphere in a $60 billion all-stock transaction, after an earlier option deal tied to xAI, and it is also preparing its first large bond offering. The Wall Street Journal reported that the debt sale is expected to raise at least $20 billion, with proceeds used mainly to repay bridge loans connected to the xAI merger.
That combination is what hit the stock. A newly public company can ask investors to believe in rockets, Starlink, artificial intelligence and space-based compute. Asking them to absorb a huge stock-funded software acquisition and a major debt raise in the same opening stretch is something else. Frankly, it looks less like confidence than speed.
Cursor is not a vanity target. Built by San Francisco startup Anysphere, the AI coding tool has become one of the more important developer products in the current AI cycle. TechCrunch reported last year that Anysphere raised $900 million at a $9.9 billion valuation and had passed $500 million in annual recurring revenue. Later reports put Cursor's annualized revenue above $1 billion and its customer base at more than 50,000 enterprises. You don't get those numbers by selling a toy to hobbyists.
The strategic logic sits inside xAI, which SpaceX folded into the company earlier this year. Grok needs better developer distribution and better coding performance if it is going to compete with Claude, OpenAI's models and Google's Gemini. Cursor gives Musk a route into the daily workflow of software teams, not just another chatbot window. That matters because the product is where developers write, review and ship code. The data and the habit are both valuable.
But price still matters. Paying $60 billion in stock for a company that was valued below $10 billion in a funding round last year is exactly the kind of move public investors are supposed to question. The Wall Street Journal's market commentary framed the broader AI deal rush as a warning sign, with companies using rich stock prices to fund ever larger AI bets. SpaceX is now the cleanest example on the board.
The bond sale adds a second pressure point. Business Insider reported that SpaceX raised $85.7 billion in its IPO and had about $100.8 billion in cash and equivalents as of June 19, yet the company is still moving to borrow heavily. That is not automatically reckless. Big infrastructure companies use debt. SpaceX also has real capital needs: rockets, Starlink satellites, launch infrastructure and the AI compute projects now attached to Musk's wider plan.
Still, investors are entitled to ask a simple question: why does a company with that much cash need to lean into debt so quickly after listing? The answer may be bridge-loan cleanup, balance-sheet management and cheaper long-term financing. The worry is that SpaceX has become a public wrapper for every Musk ambition at once.
Starlink gives the company a real business under the story. The AI layer is less settled. The New York Post, citing the company's spending disclosures, noted that SpaceX recorded a loss of about $5 billion in 2025 and that Starlink was its only profitable division. Those are not fatal numbers for a company building at SpaceX's scale, but they do make the valuation harder to defend when the first public moves are dilution and debt.
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SpaceX shares may recover. They may even get help from index demand if the company enters major benchmarks. But the first two weeks have already changed the question. Before the IPO, investors were asking how high SpaceX could go. Now they're asking how much dilution, debt and AI spending they are expected to tolerate on the way there.
