On Thursday, roughly 911 million restricted SpaceX shares — worth more than $100 billion at current prices — become eligible for sale for the first time since Elon Musk's rocket company went public. On paper, it's a routine corporate milestone: the standard lockup period that restricts early investors and employees from selling shares immediately after an IPO has simply expired, as it does for nearly every newly listed company. In practice, this particular unlock is landing at possibly the worst moment SpaceX could have chosen, and it's turning into a real-time test of how much faith Wall Street still has in the "AI mega-IPO" story Musk sold investors just two months ago.
From Record-Breaking Debut to a Trillion-Dollar Slide
To understand why this matters, it helps to rewind to June 12, when SpaceX went public in what was, by dollar value, the largest listing in history — eclipsing even Saudi Aramco's record-setting 2019 offering. Shares priced at $150 and briefly spiked to an intraday high of $225.64 as investors piled into what was pitched as a rare hybrid: a dominant rocket-launch and satellite-internet business bolted onto an ambitious artificial intelligence arm following SpaceX's merger with Musk's xAI venture.
That enthusiasm didn't last. By this week, shares had drifted down to around $109–125, depending on the trading session — well below both the $150 opening price and the $135 IPO offer price, and more than 50% off the stock's intraday peak. More than $1 trillion in market capitalisation has been erased since mid-June alone. For a company that priced its debut at a valuation north of $1.75 trillion, that's not a rough patch; it's a fairly brutal referendum on the price investors were originally asked to pay.
The Earnings Report That Should Have Helped — And Didn't
The timing gets worse. Just days before the lockup expiry, SpaceX released its first-ever quarterly earnings report as a public company, and by most conventional measures, it was a strong one. Revenue hit $7.81 billion for the April–June quarter, up 92% year-on-year and well ahead of the roughly $6.9 billion analysts expected. The net loss narrowed sharply to $541 million, down from a $4.3 billion loss the previous quarter. Starlink, the company's only currently profitable segment, grew revenue 66%, while the newer AI business reportedly grew 247%.
Normally, blowout numbers like that lift a stock. Instead, shares fell roughly 8–9% in the hours after the report. The reason: capital expenditure. SpaceX disclosed that spending — much of it funnelled into building out AI infrastructure — hit $28.5 billion in just the first half of 2026, more than four times what it spent in the same period a year earlier, and nearly as much money as the company raised in its entire record-setting IPO. Investors, it turns out, are far less interested in a company growing its top line if the cost of that growth is an open-ended AI spending commitment with no clear profitability timeline attached.
Why the Lockup Expiry Is the Real Danger Point
That's the backdrop against which Thursday's share unlock is landing — and analysts are split on what happens next. Some expect only mild, short-lived volatility, arguing that not every eligible insider will actually choose to sell, and that SpaceX has staggered its unlock schedule, with additional batches of shares becoming tradeable later this month and throughout next year rather than all 911 million hitting the market simultaneously. Others are blunter about the risk: a stock that's already down more than 25% from its offer price, sitting near all-time lows, is exactly the kind of setup where even modest insider selling can trigger a self-reinforcing slide, as nervous retail investors read insider exits as a vote of no confidence regardless of the actual motivation behind any individual sale.
There's a broader signal here too, well beyond SpaceX itself. The company was widely expected to be the first of what markets have been calling a wave of "AI mega-IPOs," with OpenAI and Anthropic both reportedly weighing public listings of their own later this year at valuations in the hundreds of billions of dollars. SpaceX's rocky post-IPO performance — strong revenue growth undermined by investor anxiety over AI capital spending — is likely to be read closely by bankers structuring those next offerings, and by investors worldwide trying to work out how to price companies whose AI ambitions are enormous but whose path to AI profitability remains, for now, mostly a promise.