SpaceX valuation hits $2.6T, briefly surpassing Amazon

SpaceX briefly passed Amazon to become the fifth-most valuable company in the world on Tuesday, as its market capitalization reached a $2.6T valuation before its shares pared back those gains before the market closed. The newly public company’s stock had already climbed 20% on Monday, which was its first day of trading. On Tuesday, the start of options trading—which refers to financial derivatives trading—on SpaceX’s shares, combined with the announcement of its acquisition of AI coding company Cursor, drove the share price higher. The stock spiked to a $2.9 trillion valuation before settling back down.

SpaceX is acquiring Cursor in a transaction valued at $60 billion in company shares. The acquisition follows a collaboration between the two companies first revealed in April, at a time when CEO Elon Musk stated that his AI company xAI—which is now a division of SpaceX—had not been built correctly the first time. Musk noted that he was rebuilding the division “from the foundations up.” The acquisition represents a bet on the company’s AI capabilities, which some view as a wild claim for a company that recently tore its AI division down to the studs.

The market’s valuation of SpaceX stands in contrast to its financial performance compared to Amazon. A comparison of the two companies’ financials highlights this gap:

• SpaceX: Posted a $4.9 billion loss on $18.7 billion in revenue last year.
• Amazon: Turned a $78 billion profit in 2025 on $717 billion in sales.

Despite these losses, investors are backing SpaceX’s AI ambitions. The company has recently added new revenue streams through compute leasing deals—which involve renting out computing power—with Anthropic and Google. Although these Anthropic and Google deals are non-binding, investors have shown confidence. Since its Initial Public Offering (IPO) on Friday, SpaceX has added roughly $1 trillion to its valuation.

The IPO raised nearly $86 billion in capital for SpaceX, debuting with a valuation of around $1.7 trillion. SpaceX only made about 4% of its total shares available for trading, which made the stock susceptible to swings. Traders swapped more than 300 million SpaceX shares throughout the trading day, representing more than half of the 555 million shares available on the public market post-IPO, according to data from the Nasdaq stock exchange.

Why it matters

SpaceX’s rapid valuation surge and volatility following its IPO highlight investor optimism regarding its AI ambitions, despite significant financial losses and a non-binding revenue model.