SpaceX falls 16% and launches $20B debut bond offering on $100.8B cash pile

SpaceX shares fell 16% Monday for a third straight losing session, leaving the average post-IPO buyer roughly flat against the June 12 debut. The same day, the company disclosed about $100.8 billion in cash and launched its first senior unsecured notes offering, with people familiar telling CNBC the target is around $20 billion. Proceeds are earmarked for retiring bridge financing and general corporate uses, including the AI capex plan the prospectus flagged. The pairing of a sharp equity retreat with a debut bond deal signals that SpaceX intends to fund Starship, Starlink and orbital compute through public capital markets.

Operationally, SpaceX opened a new business line: a Falcon 9 lifted off from Cape Canaveral at 6:53 a.m. EDT carrying Starfall, a roughly 2,100-kg saucer-shaped reentry capsule built under an FAA assessment to demonstrate point-to-point cargo delivery and return of in-space manufacturing payloads, with booster B1078 on its 29th flight. The same morning, NASA's Office of Inspector General warned Kennedy's 1960s-era pads, power and commodity lines cannot support the Starship and New Glenn pace ahead, as SpaceX plans Starship flights every eight days from Florida and the agency estimates at least $1 billion for KSC infrastructure.

Rocket Lab lofted its own Pioneer spacecraft on Electron for the Space Force's Victus Haze mission just 16 hours and 42 minutes after the notice to launch, more than ten hours faster than Firefly's 2023 Victus Nox benchmark; Pioneer will run rendezvous and proximity operations against a True Anomaly Jackal already on orbit. MDA Space detailed its $620 million all-cash acquisition of Blue Canyon Technologies from RTX as a foothold in U.S. classified defense work, and Astroscale roughly doubled project income to 11.5 billion yen as it shifts toward repeatable defense servicing missions.