SpaceX Shares Rise About 23% Over Two Days to $133.27, Still Below the $135 IPO Price, After Lockup Opens

Two Numbers That Shouldn't Both Be True

Up to 911.5 million SpaceX shares became legally sellable on Thursday, August 6, 2026 — more shares than the company sold in its entire IPO two months earlier^[2][14]. Traders had spent weeks bracing for a flood of selling to hit the stock. Instead, SpaceX shares closed up 6.1% that day^[2].

The next day was stranger still. The stock rose another 16%, closing at $133.27^[1]. Over two days, SpaceX added more than $327 billion in market value — while the shares that were supposed to trigger a sell-off just... didn't get sold, or at least not enough to matter^[1].

That's the puzzle underneath this week's SpaceX story. A lockup expiring is supposed to push a stock down, not up. To understand why it didn't, you have to look at what a lockup actually is, and why nearly everyone watching it read the same event in opposite directions.

What a Lockup Is For, and Why the Wave Mattered

When a company goes public, its employees and early investors typically can't sell their shares right away. That agreement is called a lockup. Underwriters require it because if everyone who owned shares before the IPO could sell on day one, the flood of supply would crush the price the company just spent months setting.

SpaceX priced its IPO at $135.00 a share on June 11, 2026, selling about 555.6 million shares and raising roughly $75 billion — the largest IPO on record^[5]. The stock jumped 20% on its first full day of trading, then spiked to an intraday high of $225.64 on June 16^[23][17]. By late July, it had fallen back below the $135 offer price^[17].

SpaceX's lockup doesn't expire all at once. The prospectus releases insider shares in stages: roughly 20% right after second-quarter earnings, then smaller batches every few weeks, a bigger block tied to third-quarter results, and the rest on December 8, 2026^[19][22]. August 6 was just the first of six release windows. Both bulls and skeptics agree on that schedule. They disagree on what a quiet first wave tells you about the five still coming.

There's a second mechanical piece to this week's jump, and it's less about SpaceX than about the traders betting against it. Some investors had bet the price would fall by borrowing shares and selling them, planning to buy them back cheaper later — a bet called "shorting." When the drop didn't happen, some of those traders had to buy shares back to close their positions, and that buying pushed the price up even further^[13]. That's called a short squeeze, and it means part of this week's 23% rally may reflect forced buying rather than new confidence in the company.

The Earnings Report Both Sides Read Correctly

Two days before the lockup opened, on August 4, SpaceX reported its first quarterly results since going public. Revenue came in at $7.8 billion, up 92% from a year earlier and nearly $1 billion ahead of Wall Street forecasts^[4]. Starlink alone brought in $4.29 billion, up 66%, with 12 million paying subscribers^[4]. Enterprise and government Starlink revenue jumped 108% to $1.8 billion, including more than $6 billion in contracts with the U.S. Space Force — money the government has already committed, not a projection^[4].

And yet SpaceX lost $541 million for the quarter^[4][6]. The stock fell on the earnings news itself, before the lockup even opened, as investors focused on how much the company is spending on artificial intelligence^[3].

Here's the thing: both the loss and the strength are real, and they're the same underlying numbers viewed two different ways. Adjusted EBITDA — a measure of earnings before interest, taxes, and the accounting cost of past investments — came in positive at $3.5 billion^[21]. Bulls point to that number as proof the core business genuinely works. Skeptics point to the $541 million net loss as proof the company as a whole still burns cash. Neither side is reading the filing wrong. They just disagree about whether spending on AI computing power counts as an investment paying off later, or a hole that keeps getting deeper.

Musk's Other Company Just Bet Big on the Same Bet

On the same day the lockup opened, SpaceX and Tesla announced they would jointly spend $16.8 billion on the first phase of a semiconductor plant called Terafab, in Grimes County, Texas — part of a project the two companies say could eventually reach $119 billion^[7]. Both companies are run by Elon Musk, who owns roughly 38% of SpaceX^[2].

The logic, from the companies' side, is that both firms expect to need enormous amounts of computing power for AI — reportedly up to 1 terawatt of demand between them — and buying chips on the open market means competing with every other AI buyer for supply^[7]. Building their own plant means controlling both the supply and the cost. Texas officials frame the deal as a jobs story: more than 3,000 construction jobs and about 1,800 permanent ones, backed by a state tax break under the JETI program^[7][18].

Critics, including some Tesla shareholders, see it differently. Neither SpaceX nor Tesla has ever run a leading-edge chip plant, and the two companies share a CEO — an arrangement that typically gets less independent scrutiny than a deal between unrelated companies would. That $16.8 billion in new spending is also a direct reason SpaceX's loss persists even as its revenue keeps climbing.

The Argument Nobody Can Settle Yet

The bulls' case, made explicitly by the research firm Argus when it upgraded the stock on August 7, is that insiders had a full week to dump nearly a billion shares and largely chose not to — read as a vote of confidence that the AI spending will eventually pay off^[15]. Musk has said openly that SpaceX will miss earnings quarters to fund Moon and Mars work, treating short-term losses as the cost of a decade-long build^[17].

The skeptics' case is about the calendar, not this week. A Motley Fool opinion piece, titled "The Greatest Fleecing of Retail Investors in Wall Street's Storied History," argued the staggered schedule gives insiders repeated windows to sell into retail demand over the following months^[9]. NYU valuation professor Aswath Damodaran has gone further, calling the IPO prospectus's claim of a $28.5 trillion addressable market a "hallucination," and putting his own estimate of fair value 27% below the IPO price[?].

Retail investors, meanwhile, are the group with the most riding on the outcome. SpaceX set aside an unusually large share of its IPO for individual buyers — reports range from about 20% to a plan for up to 30%, compared with single-digit shares at most large IPOs[?][?]. Anyone who bought near the June peak of $225.64 is still down sharply even after this week's rally^[17]. And because pension funds, retirement accounts, and university endowments hold the stock too, a bad outcome wouldn't stay contained to day traders — a risk Al Jazeera's pre-IPO coverage flagged explicitly, warning the $1.8 trillion valuation could prove "highly undesirable" if it doesn't hold^[10].

What the Coverage Left In and Left Out

How each outlet told this story depended a lot on which fact came first. Bloomberg led with the $327 billion market-value gain, a number that flatters the rally, while noting only later that the stock remains below its IPO price^[1]. CNN's earnings coverage led with the stock "tumbling" over AI spending concerns, mentioning the 92% revenue jump second^[3]. NPR wrote that the "once-soaring stock price drifts back to Earth" — a phrase that quietly asserts the earlier price was the illusion and the lower one is the true value^[12].

Fox Business led with Texas jobs and construction spending on the Terafab plant, adopting Musk's own description of it as the "world's largest building" without addressing that neither company has run a chip plant before^[7][8]. Al Jazeera's framing centered on risk to outside investors — pension funds and endowments — rather than on Musk himself^[10]. CNBC arguably ran the most balanced pair of stories, publishing both an "AI costs outweigh revenue beat" piece and, days later, the Argus upgrade under the headline "don't bet against Musk^[15]."

What almost none of the coverage disputed was the underlying schedule. The lockup's staggered release was written into the prospectus before a single share traded^[19][22]. Neither the July slide nor the August rebound should have surprised anyone who'd read it. The bigger test comes with the next release windows, running through the final tranche on December 8 — and neither side has any more certainty about how those will go than they had about this one.