Market Wrap · July 20, 2026
SpaceX Slides on a Scrubbed Starship Test, Tempus Draws Scrutiny Over Its Personalis Deal
U.S. equities were little changed on Monday, July 20 — a calm session at the index level that masked sharp moves underneath. The S&P 500 (SPY) slipped 0.16% to $742.09, the Nasdaq-100 (QQQ) edged up 0.10% to $696.06, the Dow (DIA) fell 0.55% to $517.94, and the Russell 2000 (IWM) declined 0.59%. The CBOE volatility-tracking VXX fell 1.60% to $22.12 and crude oil (USO) rose 1.25% to $125.51 — a far quieter tape than Thursday’s broad selloff.
The session’s biggest single-stock story was SpaceX (SPCX), which fell 3.34% to $119.85 — below its $135 IPO price — after the company scrubbed a Starship test flight due to an engine ignition failure. Elon Musk said SpaceX would attempt another launch within days using replacement engines, but investors kept selling a stock already trading at roughly 84x trailing revenue with no current profits, according to a July 20 Motley Fool report.
Tempus AI (TEM) fell 7.74% to $48.41 after law firm Julie & Holleman announced it is investigating Tempus’s proposed $16.25-per-share acquisition of Personalis (PSNL) for potential conflicts of interest, citing Tempus’s pre-existing equity stake in Personalis and a strategic relationship between the two companies dating to 2023.
Oracle (ORCL) fell 3.98% to $121.38 as its post-peak slide continued. A same-day Motley Fool piece noted the stock is now down more than 60% from its high on investor concern over AI-infrastructure spending, elevated debt ($176.9 billion in long-term liabilities), and dependence on OpenAI — even as the same article argued a forward P/E below 16 makes a contrarian buy case.
Elsewhere on the tape
Nebius (NBIS) rose 2.76% to $182.62 despite a same-day Motley Fool piece flagging Meta’s move to rent out excess AI compute as a competitive threat to independent cloud providers. Semiconductor and memory names were broadly firmer: Micron (MU) added 1.94%, Intel (INTC) rose 2.13%, and SanDisk (SNDK) gained 2.67%. Applied Digital (APLD) rose 7.99% and Palo Alto Networks (PANW) fell 2.79%; neither move corresponded to any dated news found for the session.