I've been covering the intersection of tech and crypto markets for years, and I genuinely didn't expect to be writing this sentence so soon after the IPO: SpaceX is now worth nearly twice the entire Bitcoin market.

Eight days. That's how long it took Elon Musk's rocket company to surge more than 40% from its $135 IPO price and reach a market capitalisation of roughly $2.6 trillion. Bitcoin's total market cap as of Wednesday sits around $1.2 trillion. SpaceX, a single company that posted a nearly $5 billion net loss last year, is worth more than double that.

Why SpaceX Kept Running After the IPO

Part of this move is a supply-side quirk that anyone who understands float mechanics will recognise immediately. Only about 4.2% of SpaceX shares were available to trade on the first day. That's an extraordinarily small float for a company of this size, which means a relatively small amount of buying pressure can move the valuation dramatically. The price being set on those traded shares is applied to all outstanding shares, so the market cap number looks bigger than the actual volume of market activity might suggest.

But the structural explanation doesn't fully account for investor enthusiasm. SpaceX isn't just a rocket company anymore and that's the real story driving the price.

xAI, Cursor, and the AI Race

SpaceX's February acquisition of xAI, Musk's artificial intelligence venture behind the Grok models, brought significant AI compute infrastructure under the SpaceX umbrella and put the company in direct competition with Anthropic and OpenAI, both of which have their own IPOs pending.

This week, SpaceX formalized a $60 billion deal to acquire Cursor, an AI coding startup that has become one of the most widely used developer tools in the industry. Cursor investors will receive SpaceX equity based on the implied value of their holdings. The message is clear: SpaceX is aggressively assembling an AI empire, not just launching satellites.

That positions it squarely inside the same innovation complex that crypto has been riding, frontier technology, high risk tolerance, retail and institutional enthusiasm for transformational bets on the future.

The Problem for Bitcoin

This is where I have to be direct about what SpaceX's rise means for crypto markets. Risk capital is not unlimited. When ARK Invest purchased more than $500 million worth of SpaceX shares on IPO day, it funded those purchases by selling other holdings. That's capital leaving one risk bucket and entering another.

SpaceX is now the hottest innovation trade in public markets, sitting at over 130 times its 2025 revenue. The same investor psychology that drives money into Bitcoin, the desire to own something disruptive before the mainstream catches up, is now being captured by a single unprofitable stock with a $2.6 trillion price tag.

FXTM's head of markets Lukman Otunuga framed the risk plainly: with expectations already this elevated, there is very little room for error. If SpaceX disappoints down the line, whether on earnings, regulatory setbacks, or competitive pressure from OpenAI's IPO, the fallout will spread across the broader stock market, across AI-related assets, and into crypto as well.

The Macro Week Making All of This Louder

This SpaceX story is landing in one of the most event-heavy macro weeks of the year. Japan raised rates to 1% on Tuesday. The Fed held rates today at Kevin Warsh's first meeting as chair. Gold is holding above $4,300 while oil eases. Risk appetite is returning broadly.

For now that helps Bitcoin recover from its June lows. But the honest read is this: the hottest risk trade in the world right now is an expensive, loss-making, AI-and-rockets company, not digital gold. And that says a lot about exactly where investor attention and capital are flowing.