SpaceX briefly leapfrogged Amazon to claim the title of the world's fifth-most-valuable company on Tuesday, with its market capitalization spiking to $2.9 trillion at one point before retreating. The Elon Musk-led space and AI company came within striking distance of Microsoft before its shares pared back gains by market close, according to data from the Nasdaq. The surge came on the same day SpaceX announced it was acquiring AI coding startup Cursor, and options trading on the newly public company's stock began. The stock had already climbed 20% on Monday, its first full day of trading following Friday's blockbuster initial public offering.
The rapid valuation jump is striking given SpaceX's underlying financials. The company reported a $4.9 billion loss on $18.7 billion in revenue in 2025, a stark contrast to Amazon, which posted a $78 billion profit on $717 billion in sales the same year. Investors appear to be looking past those numbers, betting heavily on SpaceX's emerging AI business. The company has signed non-binding compute leasing deals with both Anthropic and Google, and will absorb Cursor's revenue once that acquisition closes in the third quarter. SpaceX is paying $60 billion in company shares to acquire Cursor, a startup it first publicly collaborated with in April, around the time Musk acknowledged that his AI venture xAI — now folded into SpaceX — "was not built right [the] first time around" and was being rebuilt "from the foundations up."
SpaceX's historic IPO debuted with a valuation of approximately $1.7 trillion and raised nearly $86 billion in fresh capital, with the company having added roughly $1 trillion to its valuation in just three trading sessions. However, only about 4% of SpaceX's total shares were made available to public investors, a thin float that experts warned would make the stock prone to extreme volatility. Those predictions played out on Tuesday, when traders exchanged more than 300 million SpaceX shares — over half of