SpaceX’s first week as a publicly traded company is starting to look less like a conventional stock market debut and more like a highly leveraged crypto asset.
Shares of the Elon Musk-led company, trading under the ticker SPCX, extended their post-IPO rally on Tuesday as investors piled into one of the smallest public stocks ever tied to a company valued at trillions of dollars.
The stock rose as much as 13% to $210 in early market trading, according to Yahoo Finance facts.
This frenzy has also spread to the digital asset markets, where SPCX-linked perpetual futures have become one of the busiest contracts on crypto trading platforms.
Small float turns demand into momentum
SpaceX’s post-IPO rally has been boosted by the unusually small amount of shares available for public trading.
The company sold 555.6 million shares in its IPO, raising $75 billion. The sale later expanded to 638.9 million shares and approximately $85.7 billion in proceeds after underwriters exercised their over-allotment option.
Even after the additional shares, only a small portion of SpaceX’s equity entered the public market. This is because the company has approximately 13 billion shares outstanding, meaning the IPO only released a small portion of its total shares.
So Musk and other insiders still control most of the company, while lock-up agreements limit how much additional supply can reach the market in the short term.
Thierry Borgeat, co-founder of Arvy, said that structure created an exceptionally tight supply for a company of SpaceX’s size, with index funds, retail traders and momentum buyers all chasing a limited number of tradable stocks.
Crypto analyst Colin Talks Crypto made a similar comparison to the digital asset markets: argue that SPCX behaves like a token with a highly limited release schedule.
He said the small liquid float could deliver sharp early gains, but warned that later unlocks could cause selling pressure as more shares become available for trading.
That imbalance has made every wave of demand more powerful. On the other hand, because there are few natural sellers, purchases from retail investors, index funds and speculative traders can move stocks sharply higher.
CNBC’s Jim Cramer pointed this out: proverb the stock behaved like a meme stock because it had “no sellers.”
As a result, the pressure has caused SpaceX to rise more than 50% from its IPO price of $135 just days after its record listing.
Crypto platforms turn the rally into a leveraged trade
The same supply pressure that has driven SpaceX higher in the stock market has also spread to crypto derivatives, with traders using leveraged contracts to chase the rally around the clock.
SPCX traded at $222.52 over the past 24 hours, up $48.12, or 27.6%, according to CoinGlass facts. Futures volume rose 501.5% to nearly $9 billion, while open interest rose to $813 million, indicating a sharp increase in both trading activity and capital allocated to the market.
These contracts give traders synthetic exposure to SpaceX’s stock price through a crypto-native product that trades continuously and allows for leverage. That structure turned the post-IPO rally into a 24-hour speculation cycle, extending the stock market frenzy beyond regular trading hours.
For a stock like SpaceX, where public supply is limited and social media helps shape the narrative in real time, that kind of market can amplify price swings.
The leverage has already led to a sharp decline. CoinGlass data showed that more than $30 million in SPCX positions were liquidated within 24 hours as price volatility exceeded 35%. Short liquidations accounted for about $19 million of that total, compared to about $12 million in long liquidations.
That liquidation profile shows how the rally has fueled itself. When short sellers are forced out of the market, exchanges automatically buy back their positions to close out their positions.
That buying could push prices higher, forcing more bearish traders to exit the market. The same mechanic has fueled violent rallies in Bitcoin, Ethereum, and smaller tokens during busy positioning events.
For SpaceX, the loop is now clear. A thin public float drives the stock higher. The rising stock price is attracting more traders to perpetual futures. Short liquidations lead to more forced purchases. The derivatives market then reinforces the perception that the rally still has momentum.
Together, these markets have transformed SpaceX’s first week as a public company into a cross-asset momentum trade.
An AI deal gives SPCX’s rally a new catalyst
The rally gained new momentum after SpaceX announced a deal to acquire Anysphere, the software company behind the AI coding tool Cursor, for $60 billion. The transaction is expected to close in the third quarter of 2026.
The company declared:
“SpaceX has exercised the option to purchase Cursor in a full stock transaction with the goal of building the most useful AI models in the world. Over the past few months, SpaceXAI has been training a model together with Cursor, which will soon be released in Cursor and Grok Build.”
Quinn Thompson, chief investment officer of Lekker Capital, described the deal as a smart use of SpaceX’s newly elevated stock value.
He said the company used a low, retail-inflated stock price to buy real companies before the lock-up period expires, calling it a creative way to turn post-IPO momentum into acquisition power.
Additionally, the deal gives investors a new reason to treat SpaceX as a broader technology platform rather than a company defined only by rockets and satellites.
Musk has increasingly positioned the company in the areas of launch services, Starlink, defense systems, artificial intelligence infrastructure and enterprise software.
That broader identity helps explain why some investors are willing to support a valuation that appears too high relative to current earnings. Bulls are looking beyond current sales and betting that SpaceX can become critical infrastructure for several major markets at once.
The Anysphere transaction fits into that vision. Cursor has become one of the most watched AI coding products, competing in a market where OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and other tech companies are racing to automate software development.
Introducing Cursor to SpaceX would increase Musk’s exposure to enterprise AI and potentially give Anysphere access to greater computing resources.
For traders, the immediate effect is simpler. The deal ensures that the growth story continues to expand while the stock is still in the early price discovery phase.
In a market already driven by scarcity, leverage and social media momentum, a major AI acquisition gives buyers one more reason to stay engaged and short sellers one more risk to manage.
Valuation math tests the rally
The more difficult question now is whether SpaceX can maintain its valuation once investors switch from momentum trading to fundamentals.
Henrik Zeberg, macro strategist at Swissblock, warned that the rally looks more like late-cycle speculation than the start of a sustained bull market advance. He said:
“This is NOT what you see at Bull Market Take-Offs. These are the final stages of a Bull Market. And people who speculate in SpaceX will lose a lot of money… unfortunately!”
That skepticism is sharpened by the size of SpaceX’s valuation. Charlie Bilello, chief market strategist at Creative Planning, noted that the company’s market value has risen above $3 trillion, putting it ahead of Amazon and close to Microsoft.
The comparison is striking because those companies generate much more revenue and substantial annual profits, while SpaceX is still making losses.
In view of this, Bilello stated:
“SpaceX is a great company and will continue to do great things. But in a few months, we will look back on this moment as peak mania. Investors are pricing SpaceX stock as if the future has already happened.”
This means that investors have to pay for its implementation years in advance. If SpaceX continues to grow rapidly, win large contracts and convert its AI deployment into a meaningful industry, the premium may persist.
But if growth slows, losses persist or locked-up stocks enter the market, the same structure that fueled the rally could start working in reverse.