SpaceX's Stock Sits in a Squeeze Between Blue-Chip Endorsements and an AI Spending Spree

Institutional giants buy SpaceX, but AI capex and lock-up expiry push shares 37% below highs. Revenue beats, yet investors sell.

The Harvard endowment has a $2.2 billion opinion about SpaceX. So does Norway's sovereign wealth fund, to the tune of $1.22 billion. Yet the company's shares keep sliding, caught between a wave of institutional endorsements and an investment appetite that has investors reaching for the sell button.

The stock changed hands at roughly €120–123 this week, having shed about 3% in the last five sessions. That leaves the equity roughly 37–38% below its 52-week high of €194.46, touched in mid-June, while still trading about a third above the €91.04 trough plumbed in early August. With 30-day annualized volatility hovering around 91–92%, this is a name that moves — hard.

The Institutional Stampede

The disclosure season has been kind to SpaceX's credibility with long-term capital. The Harvard Management Company revealed a $2.2 billion position over the weekend, a stake that Fortune flagged as a notable vote of confidence. The University of California's investment arm reported roughly $1 billion in holdings, and endowments at the University of North Carolina and Washington University in St. Louis have also surfaced as beneficiaries of the company's public-market debut.

The heaviest weight came from Oslo. Norges Bank Investment Management filed on August 12 its first-ever public disclosure of a $1.22 billion SpaceX stake, representing 0.05% of the company, valued as of June 30. The Norwegian fund simultaneously reported a record first-half profit of $184.3 billion, underscoring that this is capital with patience to spare.

For a company whose spending plans have spooked shorter-term money, these are precisely the kind of holders that could provide ballast.

What's Spooking the Market

The friction point is capital expenditure. When SpaceX reported second-quarter results on August 4, the headline numbers were strong: revenue of $7.81 billion beat the $6.9 billion consensus by a wide margin, up 92% year over year. The net loss narrowed to $541 million from roughly $1 billion a year earlier, and adjusted EBITDA jumped 191% to $3.54 billion.

But the market fixated on the outflows. Capex hit $18.37 billion in the quarter, with $15.83 billion plowed into AI infrastructure alone — 39% more than analysts had modeled. Reuters reported the stock fell around 12% following the earnings call, with investors zeroing in on the AI spending trajectory rather than the operational beat. Management guided to more than two gigawatts of compute capacity by year-end.

The AI push extends beyond the balance sheet. SpaceX and Tesla have committed an initial $16.8 billion to Terafab, an advanced AI semiconductor complex in Grimes County, Texas, per a Reuters report from August 6. That entanglement between SpaceX's capital allocation and the broader Musk AI ecosystem has done little to calm nerves.

The Lock-Up Factor

Complicating the picture is the expiration of the first lock-up period for employee and early-investor shares, which coincided with the earnings release. Reuters Breakingviews flagged this as the next genuine test of investor demand, as additional shares become available for trading.

Elon Musk's August 13 regulatory filing added another layer: a 48.4% stake in SpaceX as of June 30. Reuters linked the disclosure to the trading dynamics following earnings and the lock-up expiry.

The Counter-Narrative

For all the spending anxiety, the underlying business keeps compounding. Starlink reported more than 13 million end-customer subscribers on August 11, up from 12 million just a week earlier, plus 22 million monthly users of Starlink Mobile, the direct-to-cell service. Average revenue per user sits at $66 monthly.

CFO Bret Johnsen told analysts the company is tracking toward a $100 billion annualized recurring revenue run rate by the end of 2026. He also noted $6.7 billion in cloud-service contracts signed in the first weeks of Q3, with the ramp scheduled to begin in October.

The balance sheet can absorb the punishment. Post-IPO, SpaceX holds $93.5 billion in liquidity, up from $24.7 billion at the end of Q1, though debt and finance leases have grown to $36.8 billion.

Launch Tempo as a Proxy

Operationally, the cadence remains relentless. Tuesday marked the company's 100th mission of 2026, a Falcon 9 flight from Vandenberg carrying 24 Starlink satellites with a successful first-stage landing. The record-setting pace hit a notable peak on August 15, when just 38.5 minutes separated two Falcon 9 launches for Globalstar and the U.S. Space Force from opposite U.S. coasts — the shortest turnaround between two orbital flights ever recorded by a single company.

Musk also signaled on the earnings call that the next Starship attempt could come as soon as August, pending regulatory approval, with plans to catch the booster with the launch tower and deploy upgraded Starlink satellites.

For now, the market seems to be pricing in both realities at once: a company executing at a historic clip, backed by the world's most patient capital, and a spending program that has yet to prove its return. The 52-week range — from €91.04 to €194.46 — captures that tension in a single chart.