SPCX stock fell 3.3% on Monday to $119.85, extending a seven-session slide and dropping below its $135 June IPO price. The move pushed Space Exploration Technologies Corp. deeper into a selloff that has already erased $1.16 trillion from its June 16 peak.
At $1.52 trillion, the company now sits below Meta Platforms and outside the top seven U.S. companies by value. For shareholders, that means a June listing that once carried a $2.68 trillion market cap now trades far lower, with the stock down about 27% in July alone.
Short sellers added as shares fell
Bearish bets rose from about 40 million shares three weeks ago to roughly 185 million shares now, equal to about 29% of Space Exploration Technologies Corp.'s tradable float. S3 Partners put the short position at an estimated $25 billion.
Peter Hillerberg, Ortex co-founder, said: "Rather than take profits, the bears kept adding the whole way down." Ortex Technologies said short sellers were sitting on $8.7 billion in paper profit since the IPO, a gain that helps explain why the bearish trade kept getting larger instead of getting covered.
Starship and a July 23 retry
On July 16, The Starship aborted at the last second before liftoff for its 13th test flight, and the abort wiped out about $100 billion in market value that day. Space Exploration Technologies Corp. then modified Starship's propulsion system and pushed the retry to July 23, giving traders a new event to mark against an already weak tape.
As of July 17, nearly half of the tradable float was out on loan to short sellers, while only about 5% of the roughly 13 billion shares were available to trade at the IPO. That combination leaves the stock exposed to fast price swings when new sellers step in or when any large block of stock becomes available.
Louie DiPalma sees a bigger base
Louie DiPalma of William Blair launched coverage with a bullish rating and said the market undervalues Space Exploration Technologies Corp.'s launch business, which he put at about $300 billion on its own. He said Falcon 9 has launched more than 650 times, Blue Origin's New Glenn has three launches, and the company controls over 90% of the rocket launch market.
DiPalma said the company is roughly a decade ahead of its closest competitors and argued the stock should not move much on any single Starship test result. He also said a bigger risk would be Google or Anthropic pulling back on their data center leases, while he was not too worried about dependence on Elon Musk because the company has leaders including Gwynne Shotwell and Brett Johnson.
KeyBanc expected early investors and employees to get their first big chance to sell stock, about 11% of all shares, around the time the company reports its second-quarter earnings, with another 4% set to unlock around day 70 and more shares after third-quarter earnings. Whether the July 23 retry and those unlocks steady SPCX stock or add more pressure is the next trade that matters.
