SpaceX has spent the past three years in the news for reasons that have little to do with rockets. The company has been in court with a neighboring company in Texas, is at odds with the FAA, and has been quietly dropped by more than one European pension fund. In June 2026, shortly before its record 75 billion dollar public listing, MSCI gave the company its lowest corporate responsibility rating, a CCC.
We took a look at SESAMm’s data on SpaceX’s and pulled its record to see what three years of coverage actually holds. Between September 2023 and September 2026, we detected 139 distinct controversy cases involving the company, assembled from news reporting and other public sources. Four of them sit in the most severe tier, and between them they carry most of the story.
SpaceX and FAA in Regulatory Turmoil
SpaceX's Environmental Challenges and Legal Battles
SpaceX Faces Scrutiny Over Workplace Safety Violations
SpaceX's Starship Program: A Journey of Triumphs and Setbacks
What Investors are doing about it
Beyond these four, the record runs heavily to labor and employment litigation, as well as to Starlink's military use and security exposure.
Investors have already acted on it. Danish fund Akademiker Pension blacklisted SpaceX in March 2025. In August 2026 the Swedish state pension fund AP7, which manages savings for roughly six million people, ruled out investing at all, citing corporate governance and human rights risk management. Both decided on evidence that had been public for years. After the listing, the stock fell 27 percent.
Takeaways
The record does not point to one isolated controversy, or even to one particular part of the business. It points to a pattern. SpaceX’s exposure sits at the intersection of the risks that come with operating at extraordinary speed and scale: safety, environmental impact, labor practices, regulatory compliance and the governance of increasingly consequential technology.
That pattern matters more than any single headline. These cases are different in substance, but they share a common feature: the underlying disputes have persisted.
The exposure is not just something of the pastl. SESAMm’s Controversy Exposure Score* for SpaceXis currently 82 (considered “Very High Risk”) f, in its “Very High Risk” band, compared with an average of 67 (HIgh Risk) over the preceding year.
This ongoing exposure shows that controversy has become a recurring feature of SpaceX’s expansion story. For investors, regulators and other stakeholders, the question is increasingly whether the company’s governance and risk controls can scale as quickly as its rockets, satellites and ambitions.
*The Controversy Exposure Score (CES) is a continuous score from 0 to 100 measuring a company's exposure to ESG controversies over time, based on the severity of incidents and their media volume.
This is an unsolicited rating: it is not commissioned by the rated company. The company is notified before its score is first issued, does not take part in the rating, and SESAMm has no access to its management or non-public documents. Ratings are produced only from public and licensed sources. Methodology: https://www.sesamm.com/methodology
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