Two birds, one SpaceX: Musk's $2.5T rocket leaves Bitcoin's $1.2T orbit 🚀

Eight days after its June 12 debut, SpaceX (SPCX) has climbed more than 40% to a roughly $2.5 trillion market capitalization, making Elon Musk's company the world's sixth-largest firm and worth nearly twice the entire bitcoin market, which stands at about $1.2 trillion. Shares gained almost 20% on the IPO session and added another 11% in premarket trading, pushing the valuation past $2.5 trillion against bitcoin's $1.33 trillion market cap at the time of the move.

The rally stems partly from a thin float, with only about 4.2% of SpaceX shares available to trade on day one and retail investors currently holding around one-third of the share volume, leaving a small pool of stock to set the price for the whole company. The offering itself sold 555.6 million new Class A shares, raising roughly $75 billion for SpaceX, with no existing holder selling at listing. Insiders retain approximately 95.8% of the equity under a 366-day lock-up, and Elon Musk and certain significant investors are bound to that same restriction.

Investor enthusiasm has been amplified by SpaceX's push into artificial intelligence, anchored by the February acquisition of xAI, which brought the Grok models and data centers into the fold, and a $60 billion deal for Anysphere, the startup behind the AI coding assistant Cursor. Anysphere grew annual revenue from $100 million to $2 billion in 13 months. The acquisition is intended to close in the third quarter, with Anysphere shareholders receiving payments in SpaceX shares, and is aimed at strengthening Grok's position against OpenAI and Anthropic, both of which have filed to go public. Financial providers have already launched specialized ETFs with double-leveraged exposure to SPCX, while the market continues to discuss rumors of a possible merger between SpaceX and Tesla.

Caution flags are waving across the Street. SpaceX posted a $4.94 billion net loss in 2025 on $18.67 billion of revenue, and one source cited a first-quarter loss of $4.3 billion, with the stock now trading at a price-to-revenue multiple of around 134x, more than 130 times 2025 sales. "With the expectations already sky high, there is little room for error," Lukman Otunuga, head of markets at FXTM, told CoinDesk in an email. "Should SpaceX disappoint down the line, the fallout will hit the broader stock market, as well as the beneficiaries of the AI boom."

Crypto observers argue the comparison tilts in bitcoin's favor. Early venture backers such as Space Capital founder Chad Anderson told Fortune, "We've been invested for almost ten years, it's our business to return capital to investors," but their exit is gated by SpaceX's lock-up schedule, which unlocks up to 20% of eligible insider shares after Q2 earnings, with further tranches tied to price targets at 70, 90, 105, 120 and 135 days, 28% more after Q3 earnings, and full release at 180 days. Bitcoin's scarcity and fixed supply schedule, by contrast, stand uncoupled from any unlock calendar, a fact crypto optimists are increasingly highlighting as SPCX trades on stretched multiples while $BTC trades near $1.2 trillion.