Starship Setback Deepens Divisions Over SpaceX’s True Worth as Starlink Strength Fails to Lift Shares
Published on 07/18/2026 at 18:54 | Redaktion boerse-global.de
When SpaceX shares sank to €108.40 last Friday, the decline marked more than just a one-day rout. The stock has now surrendered over a third of its value in the 30 days since its market debut, with the latest leg down triggered by a last-second abort of the Starship test flight. Yet the sell-off has exposed a yawning gap between the bulls who point to the profitability of Starlink and the bears who see a business valued at more than 100 times sales while still bleeding billions of dollars.
The abort occurred on July 16, 2026, during the 13th flight of the Starship program. Four of the system’s Raptor engines failed to ignite, prompting an automatic safety shutdown seconds before liftoff. SpaceX later confirmed that two engines require replacement and has rescheduled a fresh attempt for Monday, July 20. The mishap was the second test of the upgraded V3 variant and brings the program’s overall success rate to 58% — seven of twelve prior flights ended without incident. Notably, the company executed a flawless Falcon 9 mission for the Space Development Agency immediately before the abort, placing 21 satellites in orbit, but that achievement did little to steady the stock.
Friday’s close of €108.40 (roughly $122.12) represented a decline of 5.39% for the day and marked the first time the shares have traded below the initial public offering price of $135 set on June 12. The IPO had raised $85.7 billion and briefly pushed SpaceX past $2 trillion in market capitalization, with a peak of €194.46 on June 16. Since then, the stock has lost 44.26% and now sits barely 0.99% above its 52-week low of €107.34, a record set just a day earlier. The company’s valuation has shrunk by more than $1 trillion from its mid-June apex.
Should investors sell immediately? Or is it worth buying SpaceX?
The Starship failure, however, is only one factor in a broader storm. A cooling technology sector, uncertainty over the direction of U.S. interest rates, and fresh competition from China — which recently executed its first controlled recovery of an orbital rocket stage — have soured sentiment on growth stocks generally. For SpaceX specifically, additional pressure comes from short sellers, who have built positions equivalent to roughly 30% of the float and are estimated to have booked $4 billion in profits. A looming lock-up period, under which roughly 900 million shares become tradable after the company reports second-quarter earnings in early August, has amplified the downward bias as the market prices in the potential oversupply. The bond market also signals unease: the yield on a 30-year SpaceX note has climbed from 6.7% to 7.4%, pushing the price to 91% of par, while credit-default swaps have widened to 158 basis points.
That cautious backdrop has done little to reconcile the extreme range of analyst opinions. Morningstar assigns a fair value of just $63, well below current levels. MoffettNathanson rates the stock neutral with a $131 target. At the other end, Raymond James issues a strong-buy recommendation with an $800 price objective, and the consensus among analysts covering the company stands at $235.34 — roughly 80% of them rate the stock a buy. Steve Sosnick of Interactive Brokers publicly noted the market’s harsh reaction to the test failure but did not question the long-term investment thesis.
Fundamental believers anchor their case on Starlink, the satellite-internet division that generated $11.4 billion in revenue in 2025 with an EBITDA margin of 63% and more than 10 million subscribers. But skeptics counter that the company still posted a net loss of $4.9 billion last year and that even after the sell-off, the price-to-sales ratio hovers around 100. SpaceX has invested over $15 billion in Starship, a rocket central to both Starlink expansion and NASA’s Artemis IV lunar landing, planned for 2028 — a mission for which Blue Origin is also competing.
With the stock’s 30-day annualized volatility reading at 93.16% and the relative strength index down to 34.6 — approaching oversold territory — the next Starship attempt on July 20 could prove decisive. A successful launch might slow the bleeding, but it would take more than one good test to close the valuation gap that now divides Wall Street.
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