SPCX Fades to $204 as Its Options Spike Unwinds Into a Forced Nasdaq Bid

The Round-Trip

SPCX is back at $203.90, down 6.16% on the day and roughly where it sat before Tuesday's Cboe options launch lit a gamma bid that briefly tagged the mid-$220s. The post-IPO tape has been violent in both directions. The stock priced at $135 and closed its Nasdaq debut near $161, ran into the $220s as listed options and retail flow piled in, and has now ground back into its IPO-week base. The HIP-3 perp has carried real size through it — over $1.5B in 24h volume — but the directional story this session is simple: the options-debut spike has fully unwound, and there is no fresh catalyst underneath it holding the bid.

Chanos and the Valuation Math

The fade lines up with the loudest bear in the room. Short seller Jim Chanos has called the debut a function of enthusiasm for Elon Musk and AI rather than fundamentals, pegging SpaceX at "about 110 times revenues" and warning that "you just never really make much money buying equities at over 100x revenues." He concedes Starlink is a real business but argues the rest of the valuation is a forward AI bet on xAI, not current cash flow. The numbers behind the multiple are extreme on their own terms: the IPO raised roughly $75 billion, the largest in history, and the post-debut run pushed the market cap above $2.5 trillion, briefly putting SpaceX in the same conversation as Amazon. When a name trades on a narrative multiple, the first real valuation pushback tends to be where the marginal buyer steps back — which is what this round-trip looks like.

The Forced Bid Still Queued

Here's the offset to the valuation fade, and it's mechanical rather than discretionary. The S&P 500 declined to fast-track SpaceX into its benchmark on June 5, keeping SPY, VOO and IVV on the sidelines for now. But Nasdaq and FTSE Russell rewrote their eligibility rules to accommodate it, and under the revised Nasdaq methodology a top-40 newcomer can enter the Nasdaq-100 after just 15 trading days — putting SPCX on track for inclusion around July 6. That forces QQQ and Russell trackers to sell Apple, Microsoft, Nvidia and every other constituent to buy a single low-float name, a flow every affected ETF is already mapping out. This week's quadruple witching adds near-term noise, but the bigger structural fact is that a large, price-insensitive bid is queued behind a stock that's currently selling off on valuation. That tension — discretionary sellers fading the multiple while passive buyers are forced in on a calendar — is the whole setup.