SPCX Pulls Back From $225 Record as SpaceX Pays $60B in Stock for Cursor

The Fade From a Record

SPCX priced its record ~$86 billion IPO at $135 on June 12 and never looked back, closing its debut near $161 and running to $192.46 by Monday's close. Tuesday it printed an intraday high of $225.64 as the Cursor deal hit the tape alongside the debut of listed SPCX options — then it gave a chunk back. The Hyperliquid perp is down 6.11% to $202.80, the first real exhale in a name that had only gone one way since listing. With roughly $1.38 billion in 24h perp volume, this is a liquid fade, not a thin-book air pocket.

SpaceX's First Move Is an AI Bet

The spike and the fade share one catalyst. On June 16 SpaceX filed a merger agreement with the SEC to acquire Anysphere — the company behind AI coding tool Cursor — for $60 billion, its first deal as a public company, struck four days after listing. It is all stock: Cursor holders receive SpaceX Class A shares priced at the company's volume-weighted average close over the seven trading days before closing, which pencils out to roughly 312 million shares and about 3.4% dilution. SpaceX is wielding its freshly minted, richly valued equity as what one analyst called a "supercurrency" — the $60 billion tag is less than a tenth of the market-cap gain the stock has booked since the IPO. The signal traders are chewing on: the first thing a rocket-and-satellite company did with public equity was place a $60 billion AI bet.

The Skeptics Were Already Loud

That bet lands on a stock the bears already called expensive. Days before the listing, short seller Jim Chanos called the $1.75 trillion valuation "hopes and dreams," pegging SpaceX near 90x sales against Tesla's ~14x and warning that stocks around 100x revenue rarely reward buyers. Paying $60 billion for Cursor — last valued at $29.3 billion in November, roughly 15x its ~$4 billion in annualized revenue — does not answer that critique so much as lean into it. For a name that ran more than 40% off the IPO price in four days, marking the opening deal as a premium-priced AI acquisition handed the doubters an exit cue, and the 6% fade is them taking it.

The Mechanical Counterweight

Working against the sellers is a large, price-insensitive bid. Under Nasdaq's fast-entry rule, a top-40 market-cap company can join the Nasdaq-100 after just 15 trading days, putting SPCX's likely inclusion around the start of July. Analysts estimate that triggers $22–27 billion of forced index buying, with BNP Paribas modeling roughly $8 billion in the first month alone — all funneled into a stock where only about 3–5% of shares actually trade. S&P, by contrast, reaffirmed its rules and blocked early entry to its benchmarks. That is the live tension in SPCX: fundamental skepticism about a 90x-sales AI conglomerate on one side, a calendar-driven buy order into a tiny float on the other. The 6.11% pullback is the market trading the gap between them.