What goes up must come down.

Shares of SpaceX are crashing to Earth, declining a third straight day Monday as the historic post-IPO frenzy cooled and the company confirmed its inaugural bond offering.

The stock fell as much as 16.5% in intraday trading Monday, building on late-week declines following its June 12 market debut. The sell-off Monday erased more than $250 billion from SpaceX’s market cap.

After pricing its initial public offering at $135 per share, the stock aggressively spiked to a high of $225, briefly elevating SpaceX’s market capitalization past $2.5 trillion to become the fourth-most-valuable public company in the world. However, profit-taking and massive upcoming insider share unlocks have driven the stock back down to the $180 range, though it remains roughly 27% up from its IPO price.

Adding to the pressure, SpaceX confirmed in a regulatory filing on Monday morning that it is launching its first-ever bond issuance. The company plans to use the net proceeds to fully repay outstanding borrowings under a bridge loan facility.

SpaceX did not officially disclose the size of the offering, but reports indicate the company is seeking at least $20 billion in senior unsecured notes. The underlying bridge loan was secured earlier this year to finance SpaceX’s multi-billion-dollar acquisition of CEO Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence (AI) startup, xAI, in February. A syndicate of major Wall Street banks — including Bank of America, Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, and Morgan Stanley — is managing the deal.

Despite downward pressure from the debt offering, the stock pared some of its morning lows after SpaceX disclosed it held $100.8 billion in cash and equivalents as of last Friday.

Sentiment was further bolstered by an announcement from its newly integrated AI division, SpaceXAI. The unit secured a massive deal to sell compute capacity to open-source AI startup ReflectionAI. The contract will net SpaceX $150 million per month through 2029, utilizing NVIDIA Corp.’s high-performance GB300 platform in a deal potentially worth up to $6.3 billion.

Market analysts emphasize that volatility is to be expected given the company’s unprecedented $2.4 trillion valuation and its tiny public float of just 4.2%. Downward pressure may persist through the summer; 22V Research strategists warned that staggered equity lock-up expirations could allow insiders to sell up to 44% of SpaceX shares by early September, drastically increasing the available market float.

Nevertheless, long-term bulls argue that the market is mispricing SpaceX by looking at it strictly as a launch provider, pointing to its multi-platform infrastructure dominance across aerospace, Starlink satellite communications, defense, and frontier AI connectivity.