SpaceX Shorts Surge to 13% as $600B Market Cap Vanishes in Three Days

Published by James Harris on June 24, 2026June 24, 2026

Short sellers are piling into SpaceX at an unusual pace for a stock that only began trading on June 12, with short interest climbing from 8% to 13% in a single session, according to Ortex Technologies. SpaceX’s market value fell below $2 trillion for the first time since listing, with roughly $600 billion in market cap erased over three trading days.

The stock peaked at $225.64 shortly after its IPO before falling nearly 30%, a trajectory that has drawn short sellers faster than many anticipated. Around 40 million shares are currently held in short positions, representing approximately 5% to 7% of publicly tradable shares, according to S3 Partners. Borrowing costs remain low, with Ortex putting the annualized rate at roughly 1% and utilization, the share of available stock currently on loan, at around 39%, up from the mid-30s the prior week. That combination of accessible supply and rising demand to short is telling: when borrowing is cheap and easy, the shorts are not a contrarian fringe, they are a crowd forming. For context, the Magnificent Seven stocks carry short interest of just 1% to 3% of their free floats, with borrowing costs between 0.25% and 0.33%.

The options market is leaning the same direction, with put open interest running nearly double calls in several series expiring between July and September, and traders pricing roughly a 40% probability that the stock falls below $130 by mid-September, per Reuters.

The deeper signal here is about valuation framing. SpaceX came to market with a $2 trillion price tag built on a narrative mixing aerospace infrastructure with AI ambition, and retail demand alone reached tens of billions of dollars against an offering that raised roughly $75 billion total. That kind of entry enthusiasm compresses the margin for disappointment. Short sellers are now treating SpaceX less like a software-multiple story and more like a capital-intensive industrial company, which implies a very different earnings multiple. Musk’s public history of antagonism toward short sellers and the presence of significant institutional holders may slow the trade, but neither factor changes the underlying valuation math.

The options activity will clarify quickly whether this is a positioning shift or a genuine reassessment. If utilization continues rising while borrowing costs stay low, the supply of lendable shares is absorbing demand without stress, meaning the short thesis can scale further before it becomes self-limiting.