Two months ago you couldn't own a piece of SpaceX unless you were rich enough to get invited into a private share sale. Now it's a ticker on the Nasdaq, SPCX, and anyone with a brokerage app can buy a slice of the company that lands rockets on boats.
What's happened to that stock since June has been strange, and this Thursday it gets tested again.
The debut
SpaceX priced its shares at $135 on June 12 and raised around $75 billion, which makes it the largest IPO ever by a wide margin. The old US record was Alibaba in 2014 at about $21.8 billion. So this one didn't beat the record so much as triple it.
Musk spent years saying he wanted to keep SpaceX private. He changed his mind, and then did something most founders don't bother with. In a normal IPO, regular people get maybe 5 to 10 percent of the shares. SpaceX set aside a much bigger slice and let people bid through Schwab, Fidelity, Robinhood, SoFi and E*TRADE. Retail orders came in above $100 billion.
Most of those people didn't get what they asked for. On investing forums, users complained about ordering hundreds of shares and receiving one. Roughly $15 billion of the money raised still came from individual investors, which is a lot more than usual for a deal this size. SpaceX president Gwynne Shotwell said Musk wanted regular people to be able to buy in, and she hoped other companies would copy the idea.
Not everyone thought it should go ahead. Two days before the listing, Senator Elizabeth Warren sent a 12 page letter to the SEC asking it to slow the deal down. Her argument was partly about the valuation and partly about control, since Musk holds around 85 percent of the voting power. Buying the stock gets you the upside and almost no say in anything. The IPO went ahead on schedule anyway.
Day one the stock jumped 19 percent and closed at $161, which made Musk the first trillionaire. Four days later it hit $225.64 during the session, and that has been the high point so far.
Then it slid
By early August the stock closed at $108.27, an all-time low and down more than half from June. If you bought at the IPO price you were underwater.
Short sellers piled in. Betting against a stock means borrowing shares, selling them, and hoping to buy them back cheaper later. By late July short interest had climbed to about 219 million shares, roughly a third of the tradable stock, according to S3 Partners. In dollar terms more money was betting against SpaceX than against Tesla, which for years has been the favorite target on Wall Street.
The reason that pressure could build is a detail most people never think about. When a company goes public, only a small piece of it actually starts trading. Shares held by employees and early backers stay frozen for a few months under something called a lockup. SpaceX had billions of shares sitting behind that wall, and the first batch was about to come loose.
What happened on August 6
That morning, 911.5 million shares became free to sell, which is more than the entire IPO. A lot of people expected the stock to get buried. It rose about 6 percent instead.
Some holders did cash out. Jessie Bates III, a safety for the Atlanta Falcons, told CNBC he'd put $150,000 into SpaceX back in 2022 and planned to sell all of it. But the selling stayed manageable, and the short sellers were caught leaning the wrong way. Short interest dropped from about 34 percent to 11 percent. S3's Ihor Dusaniwsky told CNBC the shorts who wanted to short are out of bullets.
The stock ran about 35 percent off the low in a week and closed Friday around $140.
Thursday is the next round
About 319 million more shares unlock on August 20. Then roughly 700 million in September, and close to that again in October. Musk's own stake, more than 6 billion shares, stays locked until June 2027.
So the same test runs again, three more times before the year is out, with a bigger pile each time. Nobody really knows how these go. Jay Ritter, an IPO researcher at the University of Florida, told CNN that stocks usually fall when a lockup expires, but not always, and sometimes they rise if the selling comes in lighter than people feared. August 6 was the lighter version. September might not be.
Nobody agrees on what it's worth
The part that keeps this interesting is that SpaceX isn't only a rocket company anymore. It absorbed xAI in February, so the business now has three parts, rockets, Starlink internet running on about 10,200 satellites, and a fast growing AI arm. Second quarter revenue came in at $7.81 billion against the $6.93 billion analysts expected. Capital spending that same quarter was $18.37 billion, well above what the company took in.
That gap is the whole argument. Bulls look at the AI segment, which more than tripled year over year, and at Musk's plan to reach 10 gigawatts of computing power by the end of 2027, and they see a company spending now to own something enormous later. Bears look at the same numbers and see a launch business bolted to an AI business that eats cash faster than anyone can feed it. Morningstar's take is that the valuation asks investors to wait decades for earnings to catch up to the price.
There's more coming on top of that. SpaceX has a $60 billion acquisition of the AI coding company behind Cursor sitting on the calendar, and the Wall Street Journal reported that Musk is still pushing for some kind of merger with Tesla. Either one would change what you actually own when you buy a share.
Big money keeps showing up regardless. Harvard disclosed a $2.2 billion position. Nvidia disclosed about $21 billion. Norway's sovereign wealth fund is in too.
Meanwhile the analyst price targets on this stock run from $62 to $800. Same company, same week, same public filings, and a thirteen fold gap between the most pessimistic and the most optimistic person covering it. That's a fair summary of how much anyone knows here, so treat all of it as a story worth following rather than advice about your own money.
While the market argued, the rocket half of the company launched two Falcon 9s from opposite coasts 38 minutes apart, beating its own record of 65 minutes. It has flown close to 100 Falcon 9 missions this year.
Numbers here come from reporting by CNBC, CNN, Forbes and Bloomberg, plus short interest data from S3 Partners, as of August 17, 2026.