SpaceX went from $135 to $225.64 in five trading sessions and nobody on financial television could stop talking about the human spirit. The human spirit! That's the phrase a former Nasdaq CEO reached for when asked why a stock with a 4.3% public float and no published earnings had surged 67% in a week without a single new data point about its business. Not a revenue print. Not a Starship update. Not a Starlink subscriber count. The human spirit. Put that in your discounted cash flow model.
Let's be honest about what has been happening to SPCX this week, because honesty is apparently a niche pursuit. The company raised $75 billion pricing its IPO at $135. It debuted on June 12, closed at $160.95. Fine — big IPO, big demand, retail had a 30% allocation which is five to six times the normal cut, first-day enthusiasm, all that. Still with you. Then it hit $225.64 intraday on Monday, pushing a valuation north of $2.9 trillion, and Morningstar had a fair value estimate sitting somewhere near $62. Sixty-two dollars. Now it's back around $185 after the Fed spooked risk appetite and triggered some profit-taking into a thin order book.
Here is the actual story, which has nothing to do with Starship or Starlink or the $60 billion all-stock acquisition of Cursor that Musk announced four days after the IPO with the casualness of someone buying a used bike. The actual story is float mechanics. Only about 4.3% of SpaceX shares are in public hands. When Nasdaq changed its eligibility rules — specifically to accommodate this IPO, make no mistake about that — it triggered forced buying by every passive fund tracking the Nasdaq-100. Bloomberg Intelligence estimated S&P 500 funds alone would need to absorb 19% of the public float on inclusion, with Russell 1000 trackers eating another 24%. That's before active funds benchmarked to those indices.
In other words: roughly half of a thin public float is being mechanically inhaled by funds that don't look at valuations, don't ask about margins, don't care that the company has never reported public earnings, and will buy at literally any price because their mandate is to replicate an index weight. This is price-setting by algorithmic obligation. The price discovery you are watching is not a market expressing a view on SpaceX's long-term value. It is a supply-demand imbalance so predictable that it was modelled before the stock even opened.
The S&P 500, to its credit, declined to participate. S&P Dow Jones Indices held its ground on the profitability and seasoning requirements, which meant $30-odd trillion in benchmarked assets stayed on the sidelines — at least for now. Musk had reportedly pushed hard for fast-track inclusion across all major indices. The S&P said no, citing its rules-based integrity. Some analysts called it a mistake. What it actually was, was the last functioning piece of index governance that distinguishes between a company with a track record and a company with a narrative.
And what a narrative. SpaceX is genuinely extraordinary as a business. Eighty-plus percent of global rocket launches. Over 10,000 Starlink satellites generating real subscription revenue from militaries, airlines, maritime operators, and a lot of people in rural Montana. Musk confirmed on a JPMorgan livestream before the IPO that SpaceX had been cash-flow positive since around 2015 — which is more than most of the Nasdaq-100 could claim at comparable stages of their public lives. The fundamentals case is real. None of this is in question.
What is in question is whether a 4.3% float stock that trades like a tokenised meme of itself, buys a $60 billion AI coding startup with stock it minted at $135 while the stock sits at $210, and has a lockup expiry coming in August that will flood supply into a market that has been buying on mechanical obligation — whether that stock is priced correctly at $185 or $200 or $225. The answer is unknowable, because price discovery requires a functioning two-sided market, and what you have right now is a one-sided conveyor belt with a calendar attached to it.
The August lockup is the calendar. When insiders can sell, they will. How much? Unknown. Into what liquidity? Also unknown, because by August the forced passive buying wave may have subsided, leaving only discretionary holders who have to decide what $185 really means when the full float arrives. The RSI touched 79 on the way up. Morningstar says $62. The average analyst 12-month target sits at $187 — which, coincidentally, is roughly where the stock is now, meaning the analyst community has collectively price-targeted the very level it already reached after a week of aspiration-driven trading. The circularity is doing a lot of structural work there.
Meanwhile, the Warsh-driven rate scare took SPCX down over 5% from its highs on Wednesday alongside everything else with a long duration. Because however much CNBC frames this as a story about rockets and humanity's destiny among the stars, a $2-trillion company with no public earnings history is a long-duration asset in a rising-rate environment, and long-duration assets are exactly what the dot plot just repriced.
The human spirit is not a discount rate. But the 2-year Treasury at 4.21% is.
Buy the company. Respect the float. Remember August.
