SpaceX Stock Caps Whiplash Week With 15.7% Surge as Lock-Up Fears Fail to Materialize
Published on 08/09/2026 at 15:12 | Redaktion boerse-global.de
The script called for a sell-off. Instead, SpaceX shareholders got a rally that caught much of Wall Street off guard.
When roughly 911.5 million shares became tradable on Thursday — the first major lock-up expiration since the company's June IPO — the expected flood of supply never arrived. The stock closed that session up 6.1 percent on the Nasdaq, where it trades under the ticker SPCX, and followed through with a 15.66 percent gain on Friday to finish at EUR 115.14. The weekly advance now stands at 22.53 percent, though the shares remain 11.24 percent in the red on a monthly basis — a reminder of how brutal the preceding sell-off had been.
A Lock-Up That Never Became a Sell-Off
The expiration marked a structural shift in SpaceX's shareholder base. The newly tradable shares represent roughly 43 percent more than the 638.9 million shares the company placed at its June IPO, pushing the free float from 4.9 percent to 11.8 percent of outstanding stock. The event followed a grim stretch that saw the shares hit an all-time low of $108.27 on Wednesday — one of the weakest trading days in the company's history — after the stock had already lost roughly half its value from the $211 peak reached shortly after the June 12 debut.
Early signs suggest the selling pressure may be more modest than feared. Mizuho analyst Brett Linzey cautioned investors that tradable shares don't automatically translate into sales, while Bank of America's Ron Epstein characterized the release as a short-term technical overhang with little bearing on the company's underlying valuation. JPMorgan's Doug Anmuth acknowledged the float expansion — which he pegged at 143 percent — but noted the market had already positioned itself for the event in advance.
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Not every early investor is holding. Jessie Bates III, a safety for the Atlanta Falcons, told CNBC he plans to sell the stake he acquired in 2022 for $150,000. Such individual moves, however, appear to be the exception rather than the rule.
More Supply on the Horizon
The next test isn't far off. An additional 319 million shares could become tradable on August 20, with roughly 700 million more following in each of September and October. By December 8, up to 40 percent of the company could be freely tradable, while the remaining 60 percent — including Elon Musk's stake of more than six billion shares — stays locked until mid-2027.
The expanding float could also trigger passive flows. TD Securities estimates SpaceX's weight in the Nasdaq 100, currently around 1 percent, could climb above 3.5 percent after the index's September rebalancing.
Earnings Beat Overshadowed by Post-Market Slide
The turbulence coincided with SpaceX's first quarterly report as a public company. Second-quarter revenue jumped 92 percent to $7.8 billion, comfortably ahead of the roughly $6.9 billion consensus estimate. The net loss narrowed to $541 million, or 9 cents per share, from about $1 billion a year earlier — also better than analysts had projected. Adjusted EBITDA nearly tripled to $3.5 billion.
The market's initial reaction was puzzling: shares fell more than 7 percent in after-hours trading Tuesday, extending a slide that had already cut the stock in half from its post-IPO high. The subsequent recovery suggests investors ultimately digested the numbers more favorably.
Cursor Deal Nears Completion, Terafab Confirmed
Attention is now shifting to the $60 billion all-stock acquisition of AI coding startup Cursor, announced June 16. Musk confirmed on the earnings call that regulatory reviews are nearly complete and the deal should close "fairly soon." According to The Information, Cursor employees have been told the transaction could be finalized within days, or by the end of August at the latest. Cursor will be folded into SpaceX's existing SpaceXAI unit rather than operating independently. That division generated $2.6 billion in revenue in the second quarter, with $18.4 billion invested in data centers. Management is targeting an annualized total revenue run rate of $100 billion by December, assuming the Cursor business is included, with cloud computing as the primary growth engine.
The original agreement includes a breakup fee of $1.5 billion plus $8.5 billion in computing power should the deal fall through.
Separately, Tesla and SpaceX confirmed plans for the "Terafab," an AI semiconductor complex in Texas's Grimes County. The initial investment is pegged at $16.8 billion with at least 3,000 jobs planned, though additional phases could push the total significantly higher. Notably, the confirmed figure is well below the $55 billion initial investment outlined in a May filing, which envisioned up to $119 billion with expansions. SpaceX will power the facility through its own gas plants and battery storage rather than Tesla solar panels, according to energy and data center chief Riley Trettel.
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Musk also outlined ambitions to launch orbital AI satellites next year, moving data centers into space to undercut competitors on cost.
Starship Progress and Analyst Divergence
On the hardware front, Musk said the next Starship test flight should launch this month, aiming to deploy updated Starlink satellites and attempt the first return and landing of the upper stage — a meaningful step beyond July's test, which captured intact heat shield imagery but left the booster landing far short of rapid reusability, according to industry analyst Tim Farrar.
Wall Street remains deeply split on valuation. Raymond James's Brian Gesuale reaffirmed a "Strong Buy" with an $800 price target — the highest on the Street — citing Starship's potential to slash launch costs and open new markets in communications, AI infrastructure, manufacturing, and energy. RBC Capital's Kenneth Herbert, by contrast, maintained a "Buy" with a 12-month target of $225 while explicitly flagging headwinds from upcoming share releases. Other firms cluster between $170 and $217, mostly with buy ratings.
The bull-bear gulf is unusually wide, but this week at least, the skeptics' central thesis — that lock-up expirations would trigger a cascade of selling — failed to play out.
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