SpaceX's big week: Stock jumps despite earnings storm, lock-up expiration in crucial test for investors

SpaceX's big week: Stock jumps despite earnings storm, lock-up expiration in crucial test for investors

Pras Subramanian · Senior Reporter

Fri, August 7, 2026 at 6:48 PM GMT+3 3 min read

• SPCX +12.68%
• SPAX.PVT

SpaceX (SPCX) is poised to close out a pivotal week in the green, with the stock fighting higher over the past five sessions after reporting its first earnings report as a public company and the largest share unlock in its brief trading history.

The two events amounted to back-to-back stress tests, either of which could have sent the stock sharply lower. Instead, SpaceX weathered both.

SpaceX stock jumped on Friday, continuing the late-week momentum and up around 18% for the week.

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Space's big week opened ominously with second quarter results on Tuesday that topped estimates, with revenue and adjusted EBITDA coming in well above expectations - but the stock didn't comply.

The beat wasn't good enough to reassure investors worried about AI capital expenditures ballooning to $15.8 billion in the quarter from $7.7 billion in Q1, and the stock closed down 13.6% on Wednesday, a new all-time closing low.

Then came Thursday's unlock, when 911.5 million shares became eligible to trade for the first time — around 43% more than the 638.9 million shares the company floated in its June initial public offering. The unlock more than doubled SpaceX's public float, lifting the freely tradable portion to 11.8% of shares outstanding from 4.9%.

The expiration arrived with the stock already trading below its IPO price, a setup in which additional supply often forces holders to sell before the price slips further. Instead, SpaceX closed up 6.1% on Thursday, defying the conventional thinking that the flood of new stock would depress the price.

What makes SpaceX's arrangement unusual is its structure. Rather than releasing all locked shares on a single date, the company staggered the expiration across nine tranches over several months. Thursday's was the first — and the largest.

Morningstar analyst Nicolas Owens expected much of it to sell, but argued that the market had already braced for it. "It's conceivable that a good deal of the recent slump in SpaceX stock is precisely in anticipation of the dilution from the lockup," he wrote.

JPMorgan's Doug Anmuth made a similar case for prepositioning ahead of the expiration, "the largest of many over the next several months."

Bank of America's Ron Epstein framed the unlock as a near-term technical drag rather than a verdict on the company. "As we start working through the lockup, it'll take off some sort of technical pressure from the stock," he told Yahoo Finance.

"This quarter [Q2 financials] buys Musk credibility and time, but with the shares already below their IPO level, SpaceX will need to keep producing exceptional numbers to prevent its valuation from returning to Earth," eToro market analyst Sam North said.

Eight more tranches of SpaceX shares are still to come. Thursday cleared the first and biggest, but the stock's ability to hold its ground depends on whether SpaceX can keep delivering as the rest of the supply works its way into the market.

Pras Subramanian is Lead Transportation Reporter for Yahoo Finance. You can follow him on X and on Instagram.

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