The US bond market thinks SpaceX is junk but rating agencies don’t. Who’s got it right?

The bond market has other ideas. There, quality is judged by a bond’s credit spread or the additional yield it offers above Treasury bonds of similar maturity. The wider the spread, the lower the quality. Corporate bonds with a BBB rating are trading at an average credit spread of 0.92 percentage points (pp). SpaceX’s bonds, by contrast, trade at a significantly greater average spread of 1.62pp across maturities, higher than BB-rated junk bonds’ average spread of 1.55pp.