SpaceX stock fell almost 6% in premarket trading Monday after global financial services firm MSCI assigned the company its lowest possible ESG rating, a move that CEO Elon Musk dismissed with a quip about rocket propulsion.
MSCI assigned SpaceX a CCC rating, placing it in the same tier as Russia after its 2022 invasion of Ukraine
JIM WATSON / Getty Images
SpaceX stock fell almost 6% in premarket trading Monday after global financial services firm MSCI assigned the company its lowest possible ESG rating, a move that CEO Elon Musk dismissed with a quip about rocket propulsion.
MSCI gave SpaceX a CCC rating — the bottom of its environmental, social, and governance scale — on June 11. SpaceX received a controversies score of 1 out of 10 and a governance score of 3.2 out of 10 in the same assessment — scores that land it in the same ESG tier that Russia occupies since its invasion of Ukraine in 2022. MSCI cited exposure to ESG risks and insufficient management of those issues as the basis for the rating.
On X $TWTR, Elon Musk offered a one-line rebuttal — "Unfortunately, electric rockets are impossible" — a quip that took aim at ESG standards which hold emissions-heavy sectors to criteria those industries say cannot be met through any available technology, according to Yahoo Finance.
Monday's premarket decline extended a losing streak that began last week. Wednesday and Thursday brought losses of 5% and 3.6%, respectively, unwinding a portion of the gains that had accompanied the company's public market debut. Even after the pullback, shares held a gain of about 37% over the $135 price at which they were offered when SpaceX went public, as of Thursday's close.
The ESG rating and the stock decline arrive as SpaceX is also weighing a reported $20 billion bond sale to fund its AI and space operations.
The MSCI assessment echoes a dispute from 2022, when Tesla $TSLA was removed from the S&P 500 ESG Index despite being the world's leading electric vehicle manufacturer at the time — a move that drew Musk's public scorn given that Exxon Mobil kept its standing among top-rated ESG companies while the electric vehicle pioneer did not. "ESG is a scam," Musk wrote on X. "It has been weaponized by phony social justice warriors." S&P pushed back, explaining that Tesla's exclusion turned on more than its environmental footprint, pointing to workplace conditions, racial discrimination allegations, and how the company managed regulatory scrutiny.
SpaceX posted a $4.9 billion net loss for full-year 2025, with another $4.28 billion wiped out in just the first three months of the current year. At its peak last week, the company's market capitalization briefly surpassed both Amazon $AMZN and Microsoft $MSFT before pulling back.
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