Scottish Mortgage Reprices Its Future as SpaceX Swings Into the Spotlight

Scottish Mortgage is finding that one of its biggest private-market winners has become a public-market problem. With SpaceX now listed, every lurch in the rocket company’s share price feeds more directly into the trust’s net asset value, forcing the board to lean harder on buybacks to steady sentiment.

The latest pressure point came on 1 July 2026, when SpaceX slipped by almost eight percent to US$157.54 after Elon Musk denied reports of fresh AI-hardware plans. Even so, Wall Street remains split. Wedbush has a US$190 target on the stock and Dan Ives rates it “Outperform,” pointing to the Starship programme and twelve million Starlink subscribers. Morningstar, by contrast, has warned about excessive valuations.

That divide has helped draw in short sellers. Around 31 percent of SpaceX’s freely traded shares are now held short, an unusually heavy wager against the company and a source of added volatility for Scottish Mortgage’s portfolio valuation.

Back in London, the trust has moved to absorb some of the market noise. On 1 July it bought back more than 2.3 million of its own shares at 1,484.90 pence each. The repurchased stock goes straight into treasury, and the company now holds 392 million own shares against nearly one billion shares in circulation.

Should investors sell immediately? Or is it worth buying Scottish Mortgage Investment?

The intervention appears to be having an effect. The trust’s shares closed at 17.11 euros on Wednesday, and are currently at 17.19 euros. That leaves the stock up 23.15 percent since the start of the year, or almost seven percent over the week. It also means the shares are trading right around the 17.01 euro medium-term average, after consolidating below the May peak.

The broader private-asset backdrop remains lively. SpaceX made its long-awaited market debut in June and initially surged as high as US$225 before retreating to about US$170. A further lift may come in July, when the company is expected to join a major US technology index, potentially triggering forced buying from passive funds and estimated inflows of around US$4.3 billion. SpaceX is also set to receive a fresh monthly cloud contract from Google worth US$912 million.

Scottish Mortgage’s exposure does not stop there. Its holdings also include Anthropic, which is privately valued at US$900 billion, and Stripe, with an estimated valuation of US$150 billion. In semiconductors, the trust leans heavily on ASML and TSMC, the Taiwanese chipmaker trading on an expected price-to-earnings ratio of 28.

For now, the combination of buybacks and a more active listed valuation process is changing the way the trust trades. Where once its private holdings moved quietly in the background, SpaceX now sits at the centre of a much more visible market test.