SpaceX Stock Faces Its Biggest Test Yet: First Earnings on Aug. 4 and a Record $116 Billion Share Unlock

Six weeks after the largest IPO in history, SpaceX is about to meet the two moments that could decide where its battered stock goes next. On Tuesday, Aug. 4, Elon Musk's rocket, satellite and AI company reports quarterly earnings for the first time as a public company. Two days later, on Aug. 6, roughly 911.5 million previously restricted shares — worth about $116 billion — become eligible to trade in what would be the largest lock-up expiration in market history.

For a stock that has already lost about half its value since mid-June, the timing is brutal. SpaceX (SPCX) traded around $112 to $115 this week, roughly 15% below its $135 IPO price and about 49% below the $225.64 intraday peak it hit on June 16, just days after its Nasdaq debut. On Monday, the slide pushed Elon Musk's net worth below $700 billion for the first time since December, according to Forbes, which pegged his fortune at $695.7 billion.

Why Aug. 4 matters more than any single quarter

When SpaceX priced its IPO at $135 in June, it raised roughly $86 billion and briefly carried a valuation above $2 trillion. But the company sold only a sliver of itself — about 5% of shares — to the public. That thin float amplified both the euphoric run-up and the sell-off that followed.

The Aug. 4 report, due after the closing bell with a management call at 4:30 p.m. ET, will hand public investors their first detailed look at the machine underneath the hype. Wall Street will be watching Starlink, the satellite-internet unit that has become the company's profit engine. According to the company's prospectus, Starlink generated about $11.4 billion in revenue in 2025, roughly 61% of SpaceX's $18.7 billion total, and it was the only segment turning a meaningful profit. Analysts polled by Yahoo Finance expect second-quarter revenue of about $6.87 billion and a loss of $0.28 per share, up sharply from the roughly $4.7 billion in revenue SpaceX reported in the first quarter of 2026.

The bar is high. SpaceX grew revenue 33% from 2024 to 2025 — impressive for most companies, but arguably not enough for a stock that still trades at more than 100 times sales. Investors will be hunting for signs that growth is accelerating, not cooling.

The $116 billion question

The bigger wildcard lands on Aug. 6. Rather than the standard single 180-day lock-up, SpaceX built a staggered schedule. The first tranche frees up to 20% of restricted insider and employee shares — about 911.5 million shares, worth roughly $116 billion — on the second full trading day after earnings. Additional 7% tranches roll off through the autumn, with the bulk of the 180-day block freed by December. Musk's own controlling stake stays locked until June 12, 2027.

History suggests caution. Lock-up expirations tend to hurt most when a stock is already weak and richly valued, because they pile new supply onto shaky demand. Beyond Meat plunged as much as 24% and closed down more than 20% on its 2019 unlock day even though earnings were strong; Rivian fell 16.6% on the first trading day after its 2022 lock-up ended, when Ford signaled it would sell part of its stake. But the pattern isn't ironclad. When Facebook's biggest tranche of roughly 800 million shares was freed in November 2012, the stock actually rose about 13% — because insiders, including Mark Zuckerberg, held rather than sold, a show of confidence that helped mark the bottom.

Bulls, bears and a trillion-dollar disagreement

Few stocks split Wall Street as sharply as SpaceX. Analyst price targets run from Morningstar's $62 fair-value estimate all the way to a Raymond James call of $800. The consensus 12-month target sits around $237, per S&P Global data, which would more than double the stock from here — yet that average masks a genuine argument about what the company is really worth. 

The flashpoint this week was a Morgan Stanley note. Analyst Adam Jonas, who carries a $300 target with more than half of it tied to SpaceX's AI business, argued that if the stock fell to $100, the market would effectively be assigning zero value to that AI segment. Jonas framed the sell-off as an opportunity, writing that the "disconnect between increasingly bearish investor sentiment and largely unchanged fundamentals creates an attractive entry point." Goldman Sachs is more restrained, with a $205 target, while HSBC recently started coverage at Hold with a $115 target.

The bears have been winning. Short interest has swelled to roughly 29% of the tradable float, and short sellers had booked an estimated $15.5 billion in paper profits by late July, according to data from Ortex cited by Reuters. Skeptics point to a company still burning cash — SpaceX lost about $4.9 billion in 2025 — while pouring money into Starship and AI data centers that may take years to pay off.

What to watch next

Adding to the drama, SpaceX's 13th Starship test flight on July 24 was largely successful, deploying 20 next-generation Starlink satellites and notching what the company called its softest splashdown yet — though the stock still fell to fresh lows afterward, a sign that investors are fixed on the balance sheet, not the launchpad.

The next two weeks will test whether SpaceX is a generational company briefly on sale or an overpriced debut still searching for a floor. Aug. 4 will reveal the numbers. Aug. 6 will reveal who is willing to sell. For a stock this polarizing, both answers arrive at once.