#MyGateTradeStory

When SpaceX priced its IPO at $135 per share on June 12, 2026, the event was already historic. The largest initial public offering on record, transforming a company that had remained private for over two decades into a publicly traded entity, was bound to generate headlines. But what happened in the three trading sessions that followed rewrote the narrative entirely. SpaceX did not simply debut. It detonated the existing hierarchy of global market capitalization, adding nearly a trillion dollars in market value across its first few days of trading and briefly overtaking Microsoft to become the fourth or fifth most valuable company on Earth, depending on the intraday tick.

The numbers demand attention. SpaceX's valuation at IPO was $1.8 trillion, which already placed it above Meta, Saudi Aramco, and Tesla. By Tuesday, June 16, after double-digit percentage gains on Monday and a 4.8 percent increase on Tuesday, the market cap reached $2.65 trillion, surpassing Amazon's $2.646 trillion. During intraday trading on that same Tuesday, SpaceX briefly exceeded Microsoft's valuation, touching approximately $2.8 trillion before settling back. This means Elon Musk's space launch, satellite, and AI conglomerate, a company that only became publicly tradable four days earlier, was momentarily more valuable than the enterprise that has dominated enterprise software for four decades.

The driver behind this surge is not purely fundamental, though the fundamentals are formidable. SpaceX controls the global launch services market, operates the Starlink satellite network with over 6,000 satellites providing internet coverage across 70-plus countries, and since its February 2026 acquisition of xAI, it houses one of the most aggressive AI divisions in the industry. The day the stock passed Amazon's valuation, SpaceX announced a $60 billion all-stock acquisition of Cursor, a fast-growing AI coding startup, using its newly public equity as currency. This is the core mechanism: the stock's surging market cap creates hundreds of billions in acquisition capacity that SpaceX can deploy operationally, a feedback loop that traditional companies cannot replicate at this speed.

But the surge also raises questions that every trader must weigh. SpaceX's capital expenditure in Q1 2026 hit $10.1 billion, with AI accounting for $7.7 billion of that total. The company is spending at a rate that dwarfs its current revenue trajectory, and the stock's valuation implies a growth path that must eventually justify the price. Peter Boockvar of One Point BFG Wealth Partners captured the tension succinctly: investors are trading the story, the excitement, and Elon Musk, but at some point the fundamentals must catch up with that excitement. The perpetual futures market has already introduced SPCXUSDT contracts, and Gate listed stock-related perpetuals covering SpaceX shortly after the Nasdaq debut, giving traders two-way access to this volatility from within the crypto ecosystem.

For traders navigating this moment, the opportunity is clear but the risk is proportional. SpaceX's post-IPO rally cooled on Thursday, June 18, with shares falling 6.09 percent after two consecutive down days. The options market is active and leveraged, with newly listed option contracts amplifying price swings. The perpetual futures market offers 24/7 exposure without equity ownership. Each of these instruments carries different risk profiles, and the choice between them should reflect not just directional conviction but an understanding of the feedback loop between SpaceX's stock price and its acquisition capacity. The story is extraordinary. The valuation is real. The discipline required to trade it is the same as any other asset: know your entry, know your exit, and know that a company worth $2.8 trillion on day three of public trading can move just as fast in the other direction.

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