SpaceX Shares Reclaim IPO Price as Lock-Up Fears Give Way to Earnings Momentum

SpaceX shares hit $135 IPO price after Q2 revenue surged 92% to $7.81B, and lock-up expiry failed to trigger sell-off, with stock jumping 16%.

The narrative around SpaceX's publicly traded stock flipped decisively last week. After weeks of steady decline, the shares briefly touched their 135-dollar IPO price on Monday for the first time since mid-July, powered by a blockbuster earnings report and a lock-up expiration that failed to trigger the selling wave many had braced for.

A Quarter That Quieted the Skeptics

The numbers released Wednesday for the second quarter of 2026 were hard to argue with. Revenue surged 92 percent to 7.81 billion dollars, blowing past the 6.93 billion dollars analysts had penciled in. The bottom line also came in better than expected, with a loss per share of 0.09 dollars against a consensus estimate of 0.26 dollars. Net losses narrowed to 541 million dollars from a 1 billion dollar shortfall in the same period a year earlier, while adjusted EBITDA nearly tripled to 3.5 billion dollars.

The segment breakdown tells a story of two very different businesses. Starlink remains the dependable profit engine, delivering operating income of 1.656 billion dollars on revenue of 4.291 billion dollars, supported by 12 million subscribers — though revenue per user has ticked lower as the base expands rapidly. The AI division, by contrast, is still bleeding red ink, posting an operating loss of 1.257 billion dollars on revenue of 2.561 billion dollars. That's a marked improvement from the 2.5 billion dollar loss in the prior quarter, and the segment's adjusted EBITDA turned positive for the first time. The smaller spaceflight unit also remained in the red on modest revenue.

The losses trace back to an aggressive infrastructure build-out. Capital expenditures hit 18.4 billion dollars in the quarter, with 15.8 billion dollars funneled into data centers and chips for AI. CFO Bret Johnsen defended the spending, citing a payback period of under a year for the AI compute capacity, and reaffirmed the company's target of reaching a 100 billion dollar annualized revenue run rate by year-end. He also noted that SpaceX has secured an additional 6.7 billion dollars in contracted cloud revenue for the six-month period starting in October.

The Lock-Up That Wasn't

The real test came Thursday, when the first major lock-up expiration since June's IPO released 911.5 million shares into the market, doubling the free float to roughly 1.55 billion shares. The setup looked like a recipe for a sell-off, and many investors had positioned accordingly.

Instead, the stock jumped nearly 16 percent on Friday — its biggest one-day gain since listing. The next lock-up expiry arrives August 20, with additional tranches rolling off through December, and Elon Musk's own stake not fully unlocked until June 2027.

Retail investors, notably, turned net sellers for the first time since the IPO, offloading a net 4.5 million dollars' worth of shares on Friday. Institutions shrugged off the move: Cathie Wood's ARK Invest bought roughly 115,000 shares that same day, valued at about 13.2 million dollars. In a separate development, Nasdaq-listed Autozi Internet Technology announced Monday that it plans to build a significant economic stake in SpaceX through its Hong Kong subsidiary as a strategic treasury asset, subject to due diligence and financing.

Wall Street's Split Personality

The analyst community remains deeply divided over how to weigh the AI investment burden against the growth trajectory. Argus Research upgraded the stock from Hold to Buy on Friday, setting a price target of 160 dollars and citing "robust growth" in compute capacity. Deutsche Bank's Edison Yu called the 100 billion dollar revenue goal achievable, though he trimmed his target from 255 to 235 dollars while keeping a Buy rating.

Piper Sandler moved in the opposite direction on Thursday, cutting its target from 156 to 140 dollars. The consensus across roughly 39 analysts sits comfortably above the current share price, but the range is unusually wide — from a neutral stance around 140 dollars to bullish calls at 300 dollars.

What Comes Next

In German trading, the stock was changing hands at 114.34 euros on Monday, down 0.69 percent on the day but still up 15.03 percent over the past week. The monthly picture tells a more cautious tale, with shares down 9.59 percent — a reminder that the recent volatility hasn't fully subsided.

Investors are now looking toward the next operational milestones, including the targeted launch of Starship Flight 14 in late August, when Musk hopes to deploy operational Starlink V3 satellites and attempt another booster catch at the launch tower. The infrastructure pipeline — including the Terafab chip facility in Texas developed with Tesla and planned Gigabay sites in Florida and Texas — will also factor into how the bull-bear debate resolves.

Whether the stock holds above its IPO price will likely hinge on SpaceX's ability to back up its 100 billion dollar annual revenue promise with hard numbers in the months ahead.