Remember when Musk became the world’s first trillionaire? No longer. SpaceX’s stock price has settled way down. It’s not even 10 percent over its initial public offering price. Which means Musk’s bag is down to around $900 billion.

The SpaceX crash wiped out just about all of SpaceX’s gains from the last two weeks, which has caused massive headaches for its average investors and initial buyers. Not quite a Ponzi scheme yet, but heading in that direction. All this shows why we need a Securities and Exchange Commission that’s on the side of average investors and the public, and not bought off by today’s robber barons.

SpaceX started to crash with a report out Monday that, notwithstanding all the hoopla surrounding its IPO raising $85 billion in its first trading days, SpaceX wasn’t really flying all that high. In fact, it was floating a $20 billion bond sale to refinance its debts (mostly from its acquisition of X, on which Musk had put a lofty valuation.)

Since Musk took over X in 2022, the platform has lost almost 80 percent of its market value. No surprise. I mean, who wants to read a bunch of rightwing rants?

To make matters worse, xAI, on which Musk also put a sky-high valuation before merging it into SpaceX, has fallen way behind other American AI companies in the race to develop generative AI.

As of May, all of xAI’s co-founders had jumped ship, according to LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman, who calls xAI a “complete train wreck.” Small wonder that credit-rating agencies Moody’s and Fitch have graded SpaceX’s debt just a few notches above junk.

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Let me remind you that because of its size, a big chunk of Americans’ retirement savings and pensions (as well as university endowments) are now automatically tied to SpaceX’s market value. Yet SpaceX insiders have been able to sell their shares sooner than is usually the case because that’s the way the IPO was structured....