SpaceX Stock's Speculative Crossroads: Leveraged ETFs, a $60 Billion AI Bet, and the Tesla Merger Talk
Published on 06/18/2026 at 06:33 | Redaktion boerse-global.de
Wall Street has wasted no time turning SpaceX’s freshly minted stock into a speculative laboratory. In record time, eleven leveraged exchange-traded funds have hit the market, offering investors double the daily returns — or losses — of the space company’s shares. Providers such as Direxion, GraniteShares, and Defiance are behind the turbocharged products, which allow bets on both rising and falling prices. But the structure carries a hidden cost: the funds rebalance daily, so longer-term performance can drift sharply from the underlying stock. Defiance itself has warned that the limited liquidity of newly listed shares may undermine the funds’ ability to hit their leverage targets.
The stock itself took a breather midweek after a blistering debut. On Wednesday, the shares slipped roughly five percent in one report, closing near $192, while another data point put them around $195, a decline of about three percent. Even after the pullback, the stock still trades more than 40 percent above its initial offering price. That leaves SpaceX’s market capitalisation hovering near $2.5 trillion, slotting the company just behind Amazon in the global rankings.
The frenzy has been fuelled by the sudden availability of options contracts. Since Tuesday, traders have been able to buy puts and calls on SpaceX, with more than a million contracts changing hands on the first day. Retail investors alone snapped up close to $370 million worth of shares in the first three sessions. With a free float of no more than five percent, price swings have been extreme. Gary Black of the Future Fund has already likened the pattern to meme-stock behaviour.
Should investors sell immediately? Or is it worth buying SpaceX?
Meanwhile, deeper corporate shifts are unfolding. Elon Musk is betting big on artificial intelligence: SpaceX has agreed to acquire the AI platform Cursor for $60 billion in stock, with the deal expected to close in the third quarter of 2026. The move follows the earlier integration of xAI and is part of a broader plan to build massive AI data centres in orbit. Tesla and SpaceX are also working together on the “Terafab” project to produce AI chips, and hardware worth hundreds of millions of dollars has already flowed from the carmaker to the rocket builder.
The operational numbers show a company growing fast but bleeding cash. Revenue jumped 33 percent last year to $18.7 billion, yet the most recent quarter delivered a loss of over $4 billion. The gulf between revenue and profit has not stopped the stock from climbing — or analysts from disagreeing wildly. Price targets range from $62 to $310 per share, reflecting deep uncertainty about valuation.
One of the biggest talking points on Wall Street is a potential merger with Tesla. Wedbush analyst Dan Ives assigns an 80 percent probability to such a deal within twelve months. Prediction markets are pricing in a roughly fifty percent chance of an official announcement by mid-2027. If it happens, the combined entity would dwarf almost every company on the planet.
For now, the immediate catalyst for volatility is the leveraged ETF wave and the daily rebalancing flows they generate. The stock is caught between short-term speculative currents and a long-term strategic narrative that includes a $60 billion AI acquisition and possible tie-up with Musk’s electric-vehicle empire. The next major test for real demand comes in August 2026, when lock-up restrictions expire for early investors, releasing new shares into the market. Until then, traders should brace for brutal intraday swings as the battle between fundamentals and leverage plays out.
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