SpaceX raised roughly $75 billion in the largest IPO ever recorded on June 12. Ten days later, it came back asking for $25 billion more, this time in bonds. The market said yes, then immediately started having second thoughts.
The senior unsecured bond offering, announced on June 22, was technically oversubscribed. Orders piled up to approximately $89 billion, more than three times the deal size, which had already been upsized from an original $20 billion target. But oversubscription and enthusiasm are not the same thing, and what happened next made that distinction painfully clear.
The numbers tell a complicated story
SpaceX’s bonds received investment-grade ratings from all three major agencies: Moody’s assigned Baa1 with a stable outlook, S&P gave it a BBB, and Fitch followed suit.
The bonds priced approximately 0.4 points wide of BBB averages. The five tranches mature between 2031 and 2056, with yields ranging from 5.35% to 6.65%. Shortly after pricing, the bonds recorded around $305 million in paper losses as secondary trading revealed sluggish demand.
