SpaceX shares jumped about 6% on Tuesday, pushing Elon Musk’s rocket company briefly past Microsoft in market value. At its peak, SpaceX touched $2.94 trillion, just ahead of Microsoft’s $2.93 trillion valuation before easing lower.
The move made SpaceX the fourth-largest company in the U.S. by market cap for a moment and also lifted it above Amazon, which sits at about $2.66 trillion. Apple remains well ahead in third place, with a market value of more than $4.3 trillion.
A fast run after the IPO
The rise comes after SpaceX’s record-breaking IPO on Friday, when shares jumped 20% in their first full day of trading. The stock’s sharp move has fueled a rapid reordering at the top of the market-cap rankings.
Earlier on Tuesday, SpaceX also said it would acquire artificial intelligence coding agent Cursor for $60 billion. The deal added another major headline to an already aggressive stretch for the newly public company.
Big ambitions, bigger scrutiny
Musk wrote on X on Sunday that SpaceX “might be able to reach approximately” $1 trillion in revenue in 2030. That would be a huge leap from the $18.7 billion the company generated in 2025.
The company also posted a $4.9 billion net loss in 2025 and lost $4.28 billion in the first quarter of this year, underscoring how far the business still has to go to match its valuation.
SpaceX, founded in 2002, has become a dominant force in satellites through Starlink and reusable rockets. In February, Musk merged the company with his AI startup xAI, after combining xAI with his social media platform X in 2025.
Not everyone sees the valuation as easy to justify. CFRA initiated coverage of the stock on Friday with a “sell” rating and a 12-month price target of $115, which it said implies a nearly 29% drop from Friday’s closing price.
CFRA said its view was “due to the company’s extremely ambitious growth strategy, elevated valuation expectations, and significant capital intensity.”
Speaking to CNBC’s “Squawk Box Asia” on Monday, Steve Westly, founder and managing partner of The Westly Group and a former Tesla board member, said investors will want results quickly. “Investors at SpaceX, I believe, will get pretty grumpy after three or four quarters if he doesn’t meet some of the growth projections that they made in the S1,” he said.
Dan Ives, global head of tech research at Wedbush Securities, took a longer view on CNBC’s “Europe Early Edition” on Tuesday, saying investors are focused on where the next wave of industrial change is heading.
“When you take a further step back, it’s about this fourth industrial revolution, and investors are focused on where everything’s heading, whether it’s on ships, space, whether it comes to infrastructure, industrials,” he said.
WAMF_CONTENT_HTML_sgsippbm_END