Wall Street short sellers are raking in billions betting against Elon Musk’s SpaceX, and the establishment financial press is using the dip to tell ordinary Americans to abandon innovation for breakfast cereal.
The coordinated attack on SpaceX stock—which has plummeted 40% from its June high to below its $135 initial public offering price—isn't just about market mechanics. It is the financial establishment taking aim at the man who broke their censorship monopoly. They want Musk to fail because his commitment to free speech on X threatens their stranglehold on the public narrative, and they are using his stock dip as a proxy to celebrate his downfall.
According to International Business Times, short sellers have already booked $4 billion in paper profits as SpaceX shares tanked below the IPO price. Data from S3 Partners shows that roughly 30% of the company’s publicly tradable shares are now borrowed by investors betting the stock collapses further. The drop follows a massive IPO that raised $75 billion, but the institutional money is now circling the wagons, citing a looming lock-up expiration next month that could flood the market with 900 million insider shares. Even the bond market is flashing warning signs, with rising yields and climbing costs for credit default swaps indicating investors are demanding higher returns to hold the company's debt.
Musk isn’t backing down. He took to X to warn the short sellers directly: "The survival probability of firms who maintain a significant short position in SpaceX over time is very low."
While the shorts circle, the establishment press is spinning the dip as a reason to flee American enterprise entirely. Europe Says framed the SpaceX sell-off as an excuse to dump the rocket maker for General Mills, praising the 160-year-old cereal company’s 6.3% dividend yield and "recession resistance." They buried the ambition of American space exploration beneath a pile of Cheerios, arguing that defensive stocks selling things people "need" are safer than the pioneering spirit that built the country. It is the classic institutional playbook: demonize the disruptor, sanitize the safe, status-quo investment.
Wall Street is betting heavily that Musk's empire is overextended and that the shorts will finally break him. But if Musk’s history of defying the odds proves anything, it’s that counting him out is a dangerous wager. The open question is whether the people who actually use his platforms and rely on his rockets will let the short sellers write the future.
