The timing could hardly be worse. Just as SpaceX shareholders were digesting a bruising 14.12 percent single-day decline that left the stock at 93.46 euros, the company’s first post-IPO lock-up period expired, unleashing roughly 911.5 million shares onto the market. That tranche — about a fifth of insider-held equity — becomes tradable at a moment when the shares sit a mere 2.66 percent above their 52-week low, a level first touched on August 3.
The free float is set to more than double, from 4.9 percent to 11.8 percent of outstanding shares. And this is only the opening wave: a further 455.8 million shares remain locked because the stock never reached the 175.50-dollar threshold that would have triggered early release, while Elon Musk’s own 42 percent stake — some 6.4 billion shares — stays blocked until June 2027. By mid-2027, roughly 12.9 billion additional shares are scheduled to shed their restrictions.
A Blowout Quarter That Failed to Impress
The sell-off came despite what looked, on paper, like a stellar first earnings report as a public company. Revenue for the second quarter surged 92 percent year over year to 7.81 billion dollars, comfortably ahead of the 6.82 billion-dollar consensus. The net loss narrowed to 541 million dollars from roughly a billion in the prior-year quarter, while adjusted EBITDA reached 3.5 billion dollars.
Starlink continues to function as the profit engine: the division generated 4.29 billion dollars in revenue and 1.66 billion dollars in operating income, with subscriber numbers doubling to twelve million. Musk used the earnings call to reiterate his ambition of reaching one trillion dollars in annual revenue by 2030 — pulling the target forward from his earlier 2031 projection — while CFO Bret Johnsen assured investors that the AI investments would pay for themselves in under a year.
The $60 Billion Question
What rattled investors was not the core business but the scale of the bet on artificial intelligence. Capital expenditures hit 18.4 billion dollars in the quarter — six times the year-ago figure — with roughly 15.8 billion dollars funneled into AI infrastructure and orbital data centers. The company simultaneously announced plans to acquire AI coding platform Cursor for 60 billion dollars, a deal expected to close in the third quarter of 2026.
Should investors sell immediately? Or is it worth buying SpaceX?
That acquisition, combined with the capex trajectory, signals how far SpaceX has pivoted from its rocket-and-satellite roots. Johnsen indicated similarly elevated spending for the next two quarters, and the market is clearly wrestling with whether those billions will ultimately pay off. Skeptics point to the sheer magnitude of the outlays; optimists note that Morgan Stanley’s Adam Jonas, who set a 300-dollar price target in late July, attributes more than half of the company’s valuation to the AI segment and the promise of “orbital computing power.”
Wall Street Splits Three Ways
The analyst community has responded with markedly divergent views. Goldman Sachs’ Eric Sheridan reaffirmed his buy rating with a 205-dollar target following the results. JPMorgan moved its target up to 240 dollars, placing it among the more bullish calls. Wells Fargo’s Ken Gawrelski trimmed his target from 230 to 215 dollars but maintained a buy rating, citing an increased 2027 capex estimate of 296 billion dollars — 263 billion of which would go to AI. Piper Sandler took the most bearish stance, slashing its target to 140 dollars and downgrading the stock to Neutral, pointing to the lock-up’s doubling effect on the float, a 17 billion-dollar upward revision to 2027 capex, and the cancellable nature of certain AI contracts.
Rockets Keep Flying
Operationally, the company shows no signs of slowing. On Tuesday, a Falcon 9 launched three BlueBird satellites for AST SpaceMobile from Cape Canaveral, with the booster completing its 30th successful landing. The same day, a spent Falcon 9 upper stage from a January 2025 mission impacted the moon near the Einstein Crater, an event monitored by both NASA and the European Southern Observatory.
The next major milestone in the Starship program is Flight 14, which Musk has penciled in for late August 2026. It would mark the first orbital payload delivery and the first attempt to catch the upper stage using the launch tower’s chopstick arms — following Flight 13 on July 24, when the upper stage splashed down precisely in the Indian Ocean and the V3 Super Heavy booster returned successfully to the pad.
For now, shareholders face an unusually tangled picture: record revenue growth and a profitable Starlink franchise on one side, a historic supply of newly tradable shares and an AI spending spree on the other. Whether early backers such as Founders Fund, Craft Ventures, Valor Equity and Alphabet choose to cash out will determine just how deep this correction runs.
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