After an historic $2-trillion IPO and a follow-up 20% rally on Monday, SpaceX stock has answered one question very clearly: there’s appetite in the U.S. equity market for another tech giant.
For all other questions, refer to the options market.
Are bulls in it for a quick pop or buckling down for the long haul? Will SpaceX shares break its IPO price, or will they break out to even higher highs? What are the odds it adds another trillion dollars in market cap this summer?
And perhaps most importantly, who believes in Elon Musk’s astronomic vision more – the many but small retail investors, or the few but big Wall Street whales?
Options market makers will offer answers to these questions Tuesday as they structure the intricacies and deep contours of the options chains that will undoubtedly be met with heavy demand from speculators who were already piling into derivatives on SpaceX through proxy stocks, space-oriented businesses, blockchain-based perpetual futures, and just about any other form of exposure to high-growth tech companies including levered ETFs and structured products.
SpaceX shares
For exchanges like Cboe and Nasdaq, which together handled almost 60% of all options flows last year, and brokerages like Robinhood, where options trading accounts for roughly a quarter of total revenue, this isn’t the follow-on act; it’s the main event.
“Robinhood sort of created Elon Musk, if you look at the hockey-stick chart of Tesla since November 2019 when everyone adopted zero-commission trading,” Paul Rowady, founder of Alphacution and 35-year veteran of prop trading and hedge fund research, said in a call. “If Robinhood didn’t scare everyone into zero commissions, you never get that, and therefore maybe Elon Musk doesn’t become nearly as wealthy and powerful.”
What might matter most for Musk’s newest venture is if speculators approach SpaceX with the same vigor they’ve had for the major AI players of the past year, namely the semiconductors – whose earnings are soaring alongside their stock prices.
SpaceX, unlike many data-center stocks and AI service-providers, doesn’t make money, recording a net loss in the latest quarter of $4.28 billion after losing $4.94 billion in 2025. It’s the only publicly-traded stock with a valuation over $1 trillion that’s unprofitable as of its latest filing.
“It has the TAM of a science fiction novel while the price to earnings-growth ratio of chips is the lowest it’s been in the sector’s history,” Mike Purves, CEO of Tallbacken Capital Advisors, said by phone. “But there’s a huge bid in upside calls for anything AI-related and that means the price for protection is higher too – I’d suggest SpaceX will be having that dynamic magnified.”
In other words, get ready for implied volatility in SpaceX options to be high. With the stock trading below $200, however, one could argue the options will remain nominally affordable for smaller retail traders who have proven willing to pay up for pricey premiums in stocks that have realized big gains.
For reference, space stocks that were seeing heavy options flows prior to SpaceX’s IPO were trading with implied volatilities at or above 100, as have many of the most popular AI stocks.
That hasn’t stopped options traders from buying out-of-the-money bets on names like Micron, where daily options volume has regularly exceeded that of the total options value in index ETFs like QQQ and SPY.
It’s not unusual for the most popular stocks to trade millions of options contracts on a daily basis, with big names like Tesla and Nvidia regularly exceeding total premiums of a billion dollars.
Expect SpaceX to jump to the top of that list on day one.
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