Musk Cashes In, Ordinary Investors Get Burned: SpaceX Stock Craters 16% as Post-IPO Illusion Collapses

Elon Musk is the world's first trillionaire. The average investor who trusted him? Nearly wiped out. SpaceX shares cratered 16% on Monday alone, capping a brutal three-day collapse that has erased nearly 24% of the stock's value — and with it, the paper gains of everyday Americans who bought in after the company's splashy Wall Street debut.

Musk's space and artificial intelligence empire went public on June 12 in a record-breaking initial public offering, opening at $150 per share. The hype machine ran hot for exactly two days. SpaceX's market cap briefly surpassed Amazon and even Microsoft, and financial media declared a new era. Then reality arrived. Shares dropped 5% on Wednesday and 3.6% on Thursday before the Juneteenth holiday on Friday — and Monday's 16% plunge drove the knife deeper.

Let's be clear about who won and who lost here. The company offered its shares to insiders and institutional players at a set price of $135. By the time ordinary investors could get their hands on SpaceX stock on the open market, the price had already been bid up. Now, those same Main Street buyers have watched nearly every dollar of gain they thought they had evaporate in less than a week.

Meanwhile, Musk himself has been crowned the world's first trillionaire off the back of this listing. The IPO minted thousands of new millionaires — overwhelmingly early employees, venture capitalists, and well-connected insiders — and saw some shareholders' stakes surpass the billion-dollar mark. This is how the game is played on Wall Street: the house wins first, and everyone else scrambles for the scraps.

What did investors actually buy into? SpaceX posted a staggering $4.9 billion net loss in 2025, and hemorrhaged a further $4.28 billion in just the first quarter of this year alone. Bullish investors are betting big on the prospect of Musk driving long-term returns at SpaceX — a speculative wager dressed up as inevitable destiny by a financial press that rarely asks who builds the rockets, who welds the steel, or who gets nothing when the stock tanks.

On Monday, SpaceX also announced a senior unsecured notes offering and disclosed that it had $100.8 billion in cash and cash equivalents on hand as of June 19. The company is flush. Its founder is a trillionaire. And the workers whose labor made all of it possible have no union contract, no seat at the table, and no share of the windfall — while the investors who trusted the hype are left holding the bag.

This is not a story about a stock price. It is a story about who profits, who is protected, and who is left to absorb the losses when the IPO confetti settles. The name on the door is Elon Musk. The bill, as always, is handed to everyone else.