Featured Image Credit: Bloomberg / Contributor via Getty
$1 trillion has been wiped from SpaceX stock after seven straight days of losses in a brutal twist for the world's richest man.
For the past year, Elon Musk has been closing in on becoming the world's first trillionaire, a fortune built almost entirely on his stakes in Tesla and SpaceX rather than cash in the bank. That reliance on stock cuts both ways, and the last few weeks have pushed him firmly in the opposite direction.
SpaceX shares have gone into freefall, dragging roughly $1 trillion off the company's value and taking a chunk of Musk's net worth down with them after seven straight days of losses.
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On Monday (20 July), SpaceX stock fell more than 3 percent and closed at a fresh low of just below $120. That leaves it down 47 percent from the record high above $225 it hit just days after the company's blockbuster IPO in mid-June.
The slide has followed a run of setbacks. On Monday morning, the company scrubbed a Falcon 9 launch that was due to carry 24 satellites into orbit from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California, and only last Thursday it aborted a Starship flight test after some engines failed to start.
Two of those engines reportedly need to be replaced before another launch can be attempted. SpaceX hopes to try Starship's 13th test again this Thursday, and a clean flight would go some way to steadying nerves.
Starship is central to SpaceX’s long-term plans, so any further delays could make its most ambitious forecasts harder to meet.
None of this has knocked SpaceX off its perch as one of the largest companies in the US, though, with a market capitalisation of nearly $1.6 trillion covering its space exploration, satellite connectivity and AI arms.
However, the stock's recent weakness is reportedly giving other AI firms and investors cold feet.
Meanwhile, the tech mogul has kept his focus elsewhere. Earlier in the afternoon, he posted 'Grok for Excel is live' on his social media account. The free feature runs on Grok 4.5 and is available to Microsoft Office users. Users can ask questions to the chatbot, write formulas, run scenarios and build financial models.
For SpaceX, two dates now loom large. The first is SpaceX's inaugural earnings report as a public company, which has not been confirmed but is expected in August. The second follows straight after it, when the first of a series of lock-up expirations will let employees and early investors offload some 911.5 million shares, starting on the second trading day after those results.
