SpaceX’s First Earnings as a Public Company Collides With a Record Lock-Up Expiry
Published on 07/27/2026 at 07:11 | Redaktion boerse-global.de
The most consequential week in SpaceX’s short public life begins Monday, and it arrives with the stock already bruised. On August 4, the company will release its first quarterly results since the June IPO, and just two days later, a staggering 911.5 million insider shares — worth up to $116 billion at current prices — become eligible for sale. The sequence has investors bracing for a volatility event unlike anything the market has seen from a newly listed company.
The shares closed at €101.18 in Frankfurt on Friday, down 2.6%, leaving them just 3.73% above the 52-week low of €97.54 touched on July 23. Over the past month, the stock has shed nearly a quarter of its value. The decline from the 52-week high of €194.46, set on June 16, now stands at 47.97%. In New York, the stock finished at $115.07, almost exactly matching the price target HSBC set when it initiated coverage on Friday with a hold rating — a call that sent the shares down as much as 6% intraday.
HSBC’s Skeptical Math
HSBC became one of the first major banks to formally cover SpaceX, and its assessment was notably cautious. The bank’s $115 target sits well below the $135 IPO price and far beneath the Wall Street consensus of roughly $237. Even HSBC’s most optimistic scenario, which assumes commercial Starship operations begin by 2027, yields only $293 — still below Morgan Stanley’s $300 target and the $225 intraday peak the stock briefly touched in its post-IPO surge.
The bank’s analysts dissected SpaceX by business line and added a premium for Elon Musk’s innovation factor. But they expressed skepticism about the company’s more speculative bets, including orbital data centers, the Terafab chip project, and a lunar economy. An operational red flag also emerged: SpaceX has begun turning away customers for Falcon 9 launches after 2028 and is no longer accepting new reservations for its rideshare program.
Should investors sell immediately? Or is it worth buying SpaceX?
The Numbers Behind the Caution
SpaceX reported first-quarter revenue of $4.69 billion against an operating loss of $1.94 billion. Starlink provided the stable core, generating $3.26 billion in revenue and $1.19 billion in operating profit. The AI infrastructure business, by contrast, posted just $818 million in revenue and a $2.47 billion operating loss. HSBC projects full-year revenue will more than double to $38.2 billion but expects GAAP losses to persist through 2027 and positive free cash flow no earlier than 2030 — with cumulative capital needs of roughly $106 billion over that period.
The AI business does have significant contracted revenue ahead. Anthropic pays $1.25 billion monthly for access to about 325,000 Nvidia GPUs in the Colossus data centers, while Google has secured roughly 110,000 GPUs for $920 million per month. Combined with a smaller deal from AI startup Reflection, these agreements could generate more than $76 billion in revenue through 2029, according to a Motley Fool analysis, with Google and Anthropic alone contributing roughly $26 billion annually.
Starship’s Mixed Signal
The company’s first post-IPO Starship test flight delivered 20 Starlink V3 satellites to orbit, but five booster engines failed to ignite as planned. JPMorgan analyst Seth Seifman characterized the issue as part of a longer development process, expecting “both progress and setbacks” as SpaceX works toward dozens of Starship launches next year, hundreds by 2028, and thousands thereafter. For investors, the flight offered the first real-time evidence of how quickly Starship can be commercialized — precisely the uncertainty that underpins HSBC’s caution.
The Lock-Up and the Shorts
The August 6 lock-up expiry will release shares equivalent to 1.41 times the current float, creating an overhang that has already drawn short sellers. Bets against the stock have risen to roughly 32% of the float, up from 29% the prior week, representing about $25 billion in short positions. Elon Musk has publicly warned short sellers about their chances of survival, and the stock did bounce roughly 3% over the weekend after Macquarie reaffirmed its outperform rating.
A Barron’s analysis found that SpaceX has underperformed 90% of all US IPOs with a market capitalization of at least $1 billion since July 2009. The relative strength index sits at 33.9, signaling oversold conditions, while the annualized 30-day volatility exceeds 67%. Analysts caution against trying to time a purchase around the earnings report, suggesting a longer horizon with regular investment as the more reliable approach.
SpaceX at a turning point? This analysis reveals what investors need to know now.
The Cursor Deal Hangs in the Balance
The market is also awaiting an update on the planned $60 billion acquisition of AI coding startup Cursor, structured as an all-stock transaction and expected to close in the third quarter. If the deal falls through, SpaceX would owe Cursor a $1.5 billion breakup fee plus $8.5 billion in computing capacity, according to the IPO filings.
The coming days will test whether the stock can stabilize or whether the combination of a potentially disappointing first earnings report and a flood of newly tradable insider shares extends the downward trajectory. The two events are now inseparable: the quality of the August 4 numbers will directly shape how many insiders choose to sell on August 6.
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