SPCX Gives Back Its Options-Launch Spike, Grinding Back to $200

What's Actually Coming Off

The 7.42% slide to roughly $200.30 isn't a fresh negative headline — it's the same trade from this morning running in reverse. Cboe listed SPCX contracts on Tuesday, and the demand was immediate: more than 500,000 options changed hands in the first hour and over a million by early afternoon. That gamma bid drove SPCX to an intraday high of $225.64 and a $52 billion turnover — the heaviest on Wall Street — briefly pushing SpaceX past Amazon's $2.65 trillion market cap and even Microsoft's $2.92 trillion. Once the first-day options frenzy cooled, the same leverage that lifted the stock pulled it back. Four hours ago SPCX was near $216; it's now grinding into the $200 line, having handed back essentially the entire options-launch pop.

The Bear Case Reasserts

When the options bid fades, the math is what's left — and the math is steep. SPCX trades at a price-to-sales ratio above 150 on $18.67 billion in revenue against a $4.94 billion net loss, versus roughly 20x for Nvidia. Veteran short seller Jim Chanos has compared the IPO boom to the 'Enron era' and warned that investors rarely make money buying stocks above 100x revenue, with Jim Cramer and CFRA's Keith Snyder voicing similar doubts about the sub-$1.8 trillion IPO valuation, let alone a $2.8 trillion print. The $60 billion all-stock acquisition of Cursor parent Anysphere — meant to close xAI's gap in AI coding — is strategically aggressive, but it's dilution and a bet on fixing Grok, not near-term earnings. With the gamma support gone, that skeptic narrative is the dominant story again.

The Setup

The $200 handle is the obvious line. Even after the full give-back, SPCX sits about 48% above its $135 IPO price and roughly 24% above the $161 debut close on June 12, so the IPO-week base is still well below spot. The complication is structure: a thin 3-5% float and brand-new listed options mean volatility now cuts hard in both directions, and the overnight spike to $229.40 that briefly tagged a $3 trillion cap shows how little it takes to move price either way. On the first real pullback, some analysts flag the $140 area as a more defensible entry — a level a long way below here. The near-term question is binary: $200 holds and the options crowd reloads, or the round-trip keeps extending back toward the IPO-week range.