SpaceX shares closed Tuesday at $116.41, up 2.56% and roughly $3 off a fresh all-time low of $109.53 set earlier in the week. It’s a small reprieve. The bigger number sits eight days out: on August 6, roughly 911.5 million shares — worth close to $116 billion at current prices — become eligible to trade for the first time since the company’s June IPO.
That’s more shares than currently make up SpaceX’s entire public float.
The stock has had a rough month by any measure. It priced at $135 on June 11, popped as high as $225.64 in its first week of trading, and has since given back nearly half that gain. Tuesday’s close left it about 14% below the IPO price and down more than 25% over the trailing month, according to Investing.com pricing data.
Two dates now sit on top of each other. SpaceX reports its first quarterly results as a public company on August 4. Two days later, the lock-up expires.
Why the float matters more than the earnings print
Only 4% to 5% of SpaceX’s roughly 13 billion outstanding shares have been tradable since the IPO — standard practice for a newly public company, but an unusually tight float even by that standard. Scarcity helped drive the early spike toward $225. The unwind works the same way in reverse: when a large block of previously locked shares becomes sellable all at once, and demand doesn’t fully absorb it, the stock tends to reprice lower before it stabilizes.
The lock-up isn’t a single cliff. Roughly 20% of the 180-day restricted block clears after the Q2 earnings window, with an additional 10% eligible early if the stock is trading at least 30% above its $135 IPO price heading into that date — a threshold SPCX is nowhere near right now. Elon Musk’s own stake, about 6.4 billion shares, stays locked until June 2027 with no early-release provisions, according to Yahoo Finance‘s reporting on the 424B4 filing.
Morgan Stanley, for its part, isn’t treating the setup as a reason to bail. The bank told clients the pullback is largely detached from the underlying business, and that a slide toward $100 would effectively price SpaceX’s AI unit — the former xAI, folded in this past February — at close to zero, while still undervaluing the launch and Starlink segments.
The numbers Wall Street will actually be checking
| Metric | Value |
|---|---|
| Close (Jul 28) | $116.41 (+2.56%) |
| 52-week low | $107.01 (set Jul 28) |
| 52-week high | $225.64 (Jun 16) |
| IPO price (Jun 11) | $135.00 |
| Market cap (intraday) | ~$1.53T |
| Avg. 12-month price target | $236.71 |
| Analyst consensus | Moderate/Strong Buy (27 of 28 rate Buy) |
| Next earnings | August 4, 2026 |
| Lock-up expiration | August 6, 2026 (~911.5M shares) |
Options markets are already pricing in a large post-earnings swing — implied moves of around 15% in either direction, based on desk chatter tracked by CNBC. That’s a wide band for a company that’s only had six weeks of public trading history, and it reflects how little the market actually knows yet about SpaceX’s segment-level numbers now that Space, Starlink, and the AI business sit under one ticker.
Starlink is the one segment with a track record investors can lean on. It generated $11.4 billion in revenue in fiscal 2025 and is the company’s only currently profitable line, with subscriber counts more than doubling year over year to over 10 million across 164 countries as of the most recent disclosure. The launch business and the AI unit carry far less public financial history, which is part of why the August 4 print matters — it’s the first real look under the hood.
A separate complication: who’s buying it
At least six House members or their immediate families have disclosed SpaceX purchases since the IPO, totaling somewhere between $83,000 and $245,000, according to CNBC‘s review of financial disclosures. Five of the six sit on committees with some oversight tied to SpaceX’s government business — defense, AI, or securities markets. There’s no evidence of insider trading or rule violations. But an ethics expert quoted by CNBC noted the trades illustrate a conflict that exists independent of whether any law was broken: committee assignments that touch a company the lawmaker also owns.
The House passed a bill in late July that would bar members and their families from holding individual stocks — a measure that, if it becomes law, would eventually unwind positions like these regardless of how SPCX trades between now and then.
None of that changes the fundamentals investors are actually pricing this week. But it’s part of the backdrop heading into a stock that’s already drawing outsized attention for a company most of the public still associates with rockets, not quarterly earnings calls.
What would change the picture
Two things, realistically. A clean beat on August 4 — particularly clarity on AI-segment losses, which ran at $4.28 billion last quarter — would give the stock a floor to absorb the unlock two days later. A miss, or vague guidance, does the opposite: it hands sellers a reason to act right as supply triples or quadruples.
Analyst price targets, for what it’s worth, haven’t moved much despite the stock’s slide. The average target near $237 implies more than double the current price — a gap wide enough that it says as much about how new this stock is to cover as it does about where SpaceX is actually headed.
