SpaceX Stock's Biggest Test Isn't Its Post-IPO Drop. It's Coming in Late July.
The pullback in the largest public debut in history is the easy story to tell. But two events this summer may say far more about where the stock heads next.
By Daniel Sparks
SpaceX (SPCX 3.55%) has put new shareholders through a lot in just over a week of public trading. The rocket and satellite-internet company priced its initial public offering (IPO) at $135 a share on June 11 -- the biggest IPO ever at $75 billion. Then it jumped about 19% in its Nasdaq debut the next day, and it kept climbing from there, pushing past $200. As of this writing, however, shares have slipped back to around $185 -- still comfortably above the offer price, but low enough to leave many of the buyers who piled in during that first-week surge underwater.
That up-and-down is the story getting all the attention. But I'd look past it. The pullback is minor next to what arrives in late July or early August, when two separate forces hit the stock at about the same time.
A float built for sharp moves
Very little of SpaceX actually trades. The IPO floated about 5% of the company. Everything else is locked up, held by employees and early investors who can't sell yet. A float that thin is a big reason the stock can swing as hard as it has.
But that starts to change with the first earnings report. SpaceX used a staggered lockup instead of a single expiration date, and the first window opens within days of those first results. Eligible holders can then sell up to 20% of their locked shares, with an additional tranche released if the stock has traded at least 30% above the $135 offer price -- about $175.50 -- in the run-up to the report. As of this writing, it's meeting that threshold.
The full 180-day lockup doesn't lift until around December, and Elon Musk's enormous stake stays restricted until next June. But the first and largest near-term jump in supply lands this summer.
The first real look at the numbers
The same window brings something SpaceX has never given public investors: a quarterly earnings report. The company hasn't set a date, but results covering the second quarter of 2026 are expected in late July or early August.
Until then, the prospectus is all anyone has to judge the company's financial momentum. It showed about $18.7 billion in 2025 revenue, up about a third from the prior year, alongside a net loss of about $4.9 billion. Starlink, the satellite-internet service, did the heavy lifting -- $11.4 billion in revenue last year, or about 61% of the total, and an operating profit of $4.4 billion.
The rocket-launch business is far smaller. And the artificial intelligence (AI) segment SpaceX created by absorbing xAI in February lost more than $6 billion in 2025, which is what pulled the whole company into the red.
The first report is where investors learn whether those trends held -- whether Starlink kept adding subscribers after crossing 10 million, and how fast cash is going out the door to fund Starship and the AI build-out after SpaceX also agreed to acquire Cursor maker Anysphere in a $60 billion all-stock deal.
Where I'd be cautious
Put the two together, and this summer -- not the recent dip -- is the moment that counts. A wave of newly sellable shares meets the first hard look at a business still losing billions a year, in a stock valued at around $2.4 trillion with no earnings underneath it.
With that said, Starlink on its own is a profitable, fast-growing business. And the launch operation has no real rival in terms of reusable rockets at scale.
But I'm personally not buying ahead of that first report. I'd rather see how the numbers land, and how the stock absorbs its first real increase in supply, before judging whether the valuation holds up. More importantly, I think the stock remains overvalued relative to the size and momentum of its underlying business.