SpaceX priced at $135, ran to $225, and closed Tuesday at $116.49 — a trillion-two erased, and the unlock hasn't even hit yet. If you're just joining us: SpaceX priced its IPO at $135, opened at $150, ran north of $200, then started sliding with its first public earnings and post-results sale eligibility coming up. Morgan Stanley's Adam Jonas says the selloff undervalues the AI operations — he's got a $300 target with more than half of it pinned on AI. This is AI IPO Watch. Today, that $300 target runs headfirst into a $116 tape. The price-to-sales ratio will make you blink, and the share unlock is six days out. Let's start with the number Cassidy's been circling all week. Harshvardhan Jain, writing in StartupFeed:
The sharp downturn erased more than $1.2 Tn (Rs 114.86 Lakh Cr) from the company’s June 16, 2026 peak, one of the largest market value wipeouts on record, Bloomberg reported. Investors pulled back from riskier technology firms, hitting Elon Musk’s rocket, satellite, and artificial intelligence (AI) company hard. Shares later reversed the slump and closed Tuesday at $116.49.
There it is. Priced at $135, ran to $225, and Tuesday it closed at $116.49 — down about fourteen percent from where it went public. The pop got the parade; nobody threw one for the round trip back below the offer. And now we can size it: more than $1.2 trillion gone from the June peak, according to Bloomberg. We've been talking about this repricing all week, and it's one of the largest wipeouts on record. Funny how 'largest wipeout on record' gets a fraction of the ink that '$225 intraday high' did. The record number is on the downside — that's the part the roadshow crowd never rehearses. Here's the sequence that matters. Earnings August 4th, share unlock August 6th. So insiders see how the quarter looks, then forty-eight hours later they get to decide whether to sell — and they're already underwater versus $135. Only four to five percent of this thing has been in the public float. That first real tranche of insider stock hits a market where the buyers are already spooked. StartupFeed's flagging fresh lows below $110 if earnings and the unlock disappoint together — and the path there is uncomfortably clear now. Watch Starlink specifically. It posted an operating profit while xAI dragged the group to a $4.9 billion net loss for 2025. If Tuesday's print leans on the rocket business, that's a very different unlock than if it leans on the AI story. This one's from Fidelity:
Each share of Class B common stock will entitle its holder to 10 votes per share. Class A shareholders and Class B shareholders will vote together as a single class on all matters to be voted on by shareholders, except Class B shareholders will be entitled to elect a majority of our board of directors in addition to having certain other class votes as described under “Description of Capital Stock.”
So that's the line I've been paraphrasing all week, straight from Fidelity: Class B shareholders elect a majority of the board. Ten votes per share. Musk ends up with 82.4% of the voting power. And that's the structure four underwriters blessed at $135 — Goldman, BofA, Citi, Morgan Stanley. Same four now defending a stock that closed at $116.49. Right. Class A buyers paid for access and got one vote per share. Musk keeps 81% of his power through the Class B alone. And this is where governance stops being a footnote. The unlock's a week out, insiders are underwater on paper — and the people deciding whether to sell are the ones holding the ten-vote stock, not the retail folks holding one. 555 million Class A shares hit the market at $135. That number's in the filing. What it's worth right now is a different document called the tape. The euphoria never prices this in. Now the stock is down 14% from issue, with earnings Tuesday and the unlock Thursday. The voting mechanics are suddenly the whole ballgame. From Chris Neiger at The Motley Fool:
Despite its post-IPO decline, SpaceX is among the top 10 largest companies by market cap. Looking at its valuation, its price-to-sales ratio is 78 as of the week ending July 24. Nvidia, the most valuable company in the world, sports a sales multiple of 20, a bargain by comparison. This suggests SpaceX shares are still pricey.
So the Motley Fool does the math the S-1 risk factors could never say out loud: a price-to-sales ratio of 78 for the week ending July 24. Nvidia's at 20. And Nvidia is the one actually selling the chips this whole boom runs on. When Nvidia's your bargain comp, the number's telling you something. Here's what gets me — even after shedding all that value, it's still a trillion-and-a-half market cap, bigger than almost everything in the S&P 500. The slide only made it slightly less mythological; cheap is still nowhere in sight. And look at what's holding the 78 up. Ark's modeling a two-and-a-half trillion enterprise value by 2030, with Starlink hitting three hundred billion in annual revenue. The tape gives you today's price. That two-and-a-half trillion lives in somebody's deck about 2030. Right, and the actual price we just laid out is below the $135 IPO price. So you've got an institution pricing 2030 Mars-civilization revenue while the stock tells you what buyers think today. Those two numbers are not friends. The valuation was always a story about the future. Now you've got a live price to hold against it. The disclosure regime gives you a multiple you can stress-test for yourself. If AI IPO Watch helps you stay ahead, subscribe wherever you’re listening and leave us a quick review. That helps other people find the show, and we appreciate it.
Next on our watchlist: SpaceX reports its first public earnings on August 4. We'll be watching Starlink revenue and xAI losses. Then the share unlock is due August 6, and it could expand the public float beyond the initial 4% to 5%.
You’ll find links to every story in the show notes if you’d like to dig deeper.
That’s AI IPO Watch for today. This is a Lantern Podcast.