Musk Loses $150 Billion in a Day as SpaceX Stock Tumbles Hard

A Brutal Three Days

SpaceX stock fell 16% on Monday to close at $154.60, its lowest level since the company’s first day of trading. The drop extended a three-day slide that pushed the stock down 23% from recent highs and erased a large share of the gains it booked after a blockbuster debut.

The single-session decline was historic in scale with the Monday rout wiping out roughly $400 billion in market value, described in reports as among the biggest one-day losses by any company on record. Over the full three-day stretch, Bloomberg estimated that SpaceX shed about $600 billion, leaving its market capitalization just above $2 trillion.

Image source: X

The catalyst was financial, not operational and SpaceX said it would sell investment-grade bonds for the first time, the start of what is expected to be a heavy borrowing program to fund its artificial-intelligence ambitions. The debut bond sale unsettled investors who had bid the stock up sharply after its listing.

Musk’s Paper Losses

The selloff hit Elon Musk’s fortune hard as the SpaceX and Tesla chief lost about $150 billion in net worth in a single day, leaving him worth roughly $1 trillion. For perspective, that one-day decline exceeded the entire net worth of Warren Buffett (estimated around $145 billion), a comparison economist Peter Schiff was quick to highlight.

The losses follow a euphoric run, given SpaceX began trading on June 12 after raising roughly $75 billion at a $1.75 trillion valuation, the largest IPO in history. The stock surged to an all-time high of $225.64 on June 16, briefly pushing the company’s market capitalization past $2.7 trillion before the reversal set in.

Even after the slide, Musk remains the world’s wealthiest person by a wide margin. But the speed of the drawdown has once again brought to light how richly the market had priced SpaceX, and how quickly things can turn for a newly public megacap.

Here’s Why Crypto Is Watching

The SpaceX story carries direct relevance for crypto investors because the company is now one of the largest corporate holders of bitcoin. SpaceX’s IPO put an 18,712 BTC treasury (worth well over $1 billion) onto Wall Street’s radar, and combined with Tesla’s holdings, Musk-linked companies control more than 30,000 BTC (making SPCX a partly crypto-correlated stock).

Michael Saylor noted after the listing that a quarter of the so-called “Mag8” megacaps now hold bitcoin on their balance sheets, calling SpaceX’s debut a milestone for corporate adoption. The near-term question now is whether SpaceX’s bond sale marks the start of sustained selling pressure or a temporary reset after an overheated debut.

Musk has projected the company could generate roughly $1 trillion in annual revenue by 2030, a target that will be tested as it takes on debt to chase its AI goals.