SpaceX Stock's Rebound Story Has a Second Act: The Orbit Business Is Quietly Catching Up
Published on 08/09/2026 at 06:12 | Redaktion boerse-global.de
The market narrative around SpaceX has been dominated by one thing this week: a ferocious short squeeze that pushed shares up 22.53% in five sessions. But strip away the trading-floor drama, and a more durable story is taking shape — one that stretches all the way to low Earth orbit and back.
A Friday Rally With Multiple Engines
The stock closed Friday at €115.14, a single-day gain of 15.66%, capping a week that began with post-earnings jitters and ended with analysts scrambling to update their models. The immediate catalyst for the Friday surge came from Argus Research, where analyst Steve Silver upgraded the stock from "Hold" to "Buy" with a price target of $160, citing what he called the "robust growth" of the company's computing capacity and the swift payback on its AI investments.
That upgrade landed on top of an already-smoldering fuse. The expiration of the first insider lock-up period on August 6 — which freed 911.5 million insider shares and swelled the free float from 639 million to 1.55 billion shares, according to Bloomberg — had been widely expected to trigger a wave of selling. Instead, the stock closed up 6.1% that day, absorbing the supply with ease. With more than 250 million shares, or roughly 16% of the free float, reportedly sold short, the subsequent squeeze has forced bears to cover, adding fuel to the rally.
The Numbers That Changed the Conversation
The week's turbulence began Tuesday, when SpaceX delivered its first quarterly report as a public company. Revenue for Q2 2026 came in at $7.8 billion, up 92% year-over-year and comfortably ahead of the roughly $6.9 billion analysts had penciled in. The net loss narrowed to $541 million, or $0.09 per share, from $1 billion a year earlier, while adjusted EBITDA nearly tripled to $3.5 billion.
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Yet the initial reaction was sour — shares fell more than 7% in after-hours trading as investors weighed persistent losses against heavy capital spending. The mood shifted once the market digested the AI segment's trajectory. Revenue there jumped 247% year-over-year, and adjusted EBITDA swung from a loss to a profit of $1.146 billion. The growth is underpinned by a deal with Reflection AI to supply Nvidia chips worth $150 million per month, plus an additional $6.7 billion in cloud orders booked in the early weeks of Q3, set to ramp over six months starting in October. CEO Elon Musk told analysts the company will equip its AI data centers exclusively with Nvidia hardware, targeting over 2 gigawatts of compute capacity by year-end and nearly 10 gigawatts by the end of 2027.
Starlink's Quiet Doubling
Meanwhile, the connectivity business — the other pillar of SpaceX's growth thesis — continues to compound. Starlink subscribers doubled to 12 million, contributing $4.3 billion to quarterly revenue. Morningstar analyst Nicolas Owens flagged subscriber growth and the return on AI infrastructure investment as the two metrics that will determine how the market justifies the company's current market capitalization of roughly €1,309.52 billion.
The Long Game in Orbit
Beyond the financials, SpaceX's operational cadence shows no signs of slowing. On August 4, a Falcon 9 from Vandenberg Space Force Base carried 24 Starlink satellites into orbit — the 90th Falcon 9 flight of the year (the primary source counts 92 launches year-to-date, a discrepancy that reflects timing of reporting). A day later, another Falcon 9 lifted off from Cape Canaveral with three BlueBird satellites for AST SpaceMobile, marking the 30th landing of a first stage on a drone ship.
The company is also making progress on its most ambitious projects. NASA confirmed that the "U.S. Deorbit Vehicle" — a modified Cargo Dragon designed to guide the International Space Station out of orbit in 2030 — has formally entered its development phase, following a baseline approval granted in February 2026. And all eyes are on late August, when Starship Flight 14 is expected to attempt its first full orbital flight and a "catch" of the spacecraft at Starbase, Texas. Flight 13 on July 24 already achieved a successful ocean landing of the Super Heavy booster and deployed 20 Starlink v3 satellites.
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Not everything in orbit goes according to plan. The Guardian reported that a roughly four-ton Falcon 9 upper stage from a 2025 mission crashed into the lunar surface Wednesday at approximately 5,400 miles per hour — a reminder that even successful launch programs leave debris behind.
For now, the market's attention is fixed on the squeeze and the upgrade cycle. But the fundamental question — whether SpaceX can convert its launch cadence, Starlink growth, and AI compute ambitions into sustained profitability — will be answered over many quarters, not days.
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