Rockets aren’t the only things capable of reaching escape velocity: SpaceX surged 4.8% Tuesday, marking its third consecutive gain after a landmark initial public offering.

The company’s market capitalization even surpassed Amazon and Microsoft in intraday trading, briefly making it the fourth-biggest US company, before closing at a $2.6 trillion valuation. Some analysts remain wary.

A Cursor-y Glance

The excitement around SpaceX relies on the promise of unproven technologies that the company itself admits may not be commercially viable. SpaceX lost $4.9 billion on $18.7 billion in revenue last year. Amazon made $77.7 billion on $716.9 billion in revenue, and Microsoft netted $101.8 billion on $281.7 billion in revenue. One of these is not the same.

“The trading price implies all the company’s projects will pay off according to our most optimistic scenario, which depends on rapid Starship reusability and compelling commercialization of orbital data centers,” Morningstar analysts, who view SpaceX as highly overvalued, wrote Tuesday. They lowered their price for the stock, which closed at $201.80, by a dollar to $62. But SpaceX did make a significant move toward monetization. A $60 billion all-stock deal to acquire automated coding startup Cursor, a leader in “vibe coding” popular among tech developers, is expected to vault its xAI unit into a more competitive position against AI rivals OpenAI and Anthropic. Morningstar said an AI revenue boost could lift its bearish view of the stock to $154 to $169 per share. In the meantime, other enthusiastic market forces are fueling SpaceX’s boosters:

• Its valuation remains driven by a massive imbalance in supply and demand. The 555.6 million shares sold in last week’s IPO represented just 5% of its outstanding stock, leaving FOMO-ing retail investors clawing for the limited float: Vanda Research said retail traders bought $225.2 million in SpaceX stock in its first two days of trading, equal to 75% of all net buying of single stocks.
• Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Eric Balchunas tweeted that 11 leveraged ETFs benchmarked to SpaceX, vehicles that can amplify a stock’s movement, attracted more than $3 billion in volume Tuesday, up from $1 billion on their Monday debut, in a “total feeding frenzy.”

Consider the Options: Analysts at Concretum Group wrote that “hedge funds and other sophisticated market participants” are likely loading up on SpaceX because they can later sell it to index funds and ETFs. Another rallying force is the trading in SpaceX options, which began Tuesday with a record debut of 1.8 million contracts worth $2.8 billion trading hands. Call options outnumbered put options 1.3-1, according to Cboe Global Markets data, meaning more investors were looking to purchase the stock at a set price than sell.

However much they stuff their crusts, Pizza Hut can’t crack the upper crust of quick-service restaurants. And parent-company Yum Brands has finally had enough.

On Tuesday, the fast-food conglomerate, which also owns Taco Bell and Kentucky Fried Chicken, announced that it had struck a deal to sell the struggling pizza chain for $2.7 billion.

Slice of Life

Pizza Hut is underperforming just about any way you slice it. Unlike KFC and Taco Bell, the latter of which is on a Diablo Sauce-level hot streak, both revenue and profit declined for Pizza Hut in 2025, according to Yum’s fourth-quarter earnings report, and profit continued to bottom out in the first three months of this year. (Customers are also increasingly getting in the habit of visiting Habit Burger & Grill, Yum’s small but growing California-based burger chain.)

“Out of the different brands in Yum’s portfolio, [Pizza Hut] was probably the one that had been underinvested in the last couple of years,” R.J. Hottovy, head of analytical research at Placer.ai, told The Daily Upside. “I think, honestly, they were still trying to figure out what they wanted to do with it.”

Foot traffic to stores has declined year over year in every month but April through 2026, according to Placer.ai, largely in contrast to industry peers; rival Domino’s has practically pie-in-the-sky visit growth by comparison.

Fed up, Yum opted to sell the company in a two-piece deal:

• Yum is selling the Pizza Hut locations in China to Yum China for $1.2 billion, a move that will transform Yum China from a franchisee of 4,300 China-based Pizza Huts to a direct brand owner.
• Private equity firm LongRange Capital will pick up the rest of the company for $1.5 billion. China accounts for roughly one-fifth of all Pizza Hut system sales, while US locations account for roughly double that.

Say Cheese: Still, Pizza Hut’s struggles aren’t exactly singular. The entire quick-service industry has been under pressure from lower-income consumers who are fleeing chains in favor of supermarkets, Hottovy said. (Frozen pizzas, after all, have come a long way.) Meanwhile, the rapid rise of GLP-1 drugs has drastically changed consumers’ appetites. One KPMG study found that adult GLP-1 users now consume 21% fewer calories, leaving a lot less room for that third or fourth slice.

Motor City is becoming Mortar City.

Lockheed Martin is teaming up with General Motors to “strengthen America’s manufacturing and defense industrial base, facilitated by the US Department of War,” the companies said in a statement Tuesday. The Wall Street Journal reported that GM is in talks to make parts for Lockheed Martin’s weapons and that the companies are still discussing which components the automaker could manufacture, citing people familiar with the matter.

Detroit’s Defense Roots

US weaponry stockpiles were insufficient before the war with Iran. But between the conflict in the Middle East, ongoing support of Ukraine and efforts to increase its ability to deter Chinese aggression toward Taiwan, the military faces an even more critical depletion. In April, senior defense officials in the Trump administration reportedly met with GM CEO Mary Barra and Ford Motor CEO Jim Farley to discuss the companies manufacturing weapons and military supplies.

The efforts to bring automakers into the weapons-making arena are reminiscent of World War II, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt tapped into the manufacturing might of car companies, including GM and Ford, giving Detroit the nickname “Arsenal of Democracy.”

More than 90 years later, new business is likely welcome at GM:

• GM’s growth capacity has become strained in recent years, in part due to uncertainty around the future of electric vehicle (EV) demand and competition in China from local rivals.
• The company made its return to military work in 2017 with GM Defense, and it certainly has the manufacturing capacity to contribute now.

Building Batteries: To compensate for slower-than-expected EV sales, General Motors jumped on the storage battery bandwagon last week, joining Ford, Tesla and other automakers. The company announced it is developing batteries for large-scale energy storage systems for major power users, an effort to take advantage of the expected growth of energy storage and data centers. Compared with dominant lithium-ion chemistry, “sodium ion-powered energy storage systems have the potential to operate without active cooling and with much less system complexity,” Kurt Kelty, GM’s vice president of battery and sustainability, wrote in a blog post. “In large energy storage systems, that matters.”