Analysis
SpaceX shares fell as much as 5-6% Thursday and closed at $134.00 -- below the company's $135 IPO price -- after 319 million additional shares held by early employees and investors became eligible to trade, wiping out an estimated $103 billion of SpaceX's implied market capitalization in a single session, according to multiple outlets including Yahoo Finance and 24/7 Wall St. Rocket Lab shares fell roughly 4% in sympathy the same day.
SpaceX went public on Nasdaq under ticker SPCX on June 12, 2026 at a $1.77 trillion valuation, after filing its public S-1 on May 20 -- reported at the time as the largest IPO ever completed. Like most large IPOs, SpaceX structured its post-IPO share unlock in staggered tranches rather than releasing all pre-IPO shares at once, a mechanism meant to prevent an immediate flood of selling from employees and early investors overwhelming the new public float.
“## What's still ahead SpaceX's total lockup schedule releases roughly 88% of its approximately 13 billion outstanding shares through 2027 in a series of tranches.”
## Why this unlock hit differently than the last one This is the second lockup-expiration event since the IPO. The first and larger release -- up to 911.5 million shares -- hit on August 6, and the stock absorbed it without much disruption, actually rising about 6% in the days after as buying demand outpaced the new supply. Thursday's smaller, 319-million-share tranche instead pushed the stock below its IPO price, a reversal that suggests either broader sentiment has cooled since early August, or that the specific holders selling into this tranche are less patient than the ones who had shares free to sell two weeks earlier.
## What's still ahead SpaceX's total lockup schedule releases roughly 88% of its approximately 13 billion outstanding shares through 2027 in a series of tranches. The next major release -- roughly 1.3 billion shares -- is expected around SpaceX's third-quarter earnings in early November 2026, with the full 180-day lockup expiring in December. That means the stock faces at least two more scheduled events of comparable or larger size than Thursday's before the end of the year, each one a fresh test of whether public-market demand can absorb pre-IPO holders realizing liquidity at whatever price the market offers that day.
## The counterweight A single day's 5-6% move driven by a scheduled, publicly known unlock date is closer to normal post-IPO mechanics than a signal about SpaceX's underlying business -- lockup expirations are calendar events every large IPO investor already knows about in advance, and the resulting price pressure reflects available share supply meeting demand, not new information about the company's rockets, satellites, or Starlink business. The $103 billion "erased" framing is also a market-cap calculation on paper losses for existing holders, not a cash outcome, and it can just as easily reverse the way the August 6 unlock's aftermath did. What would actually be a concerning signal is if the stock fails to recover the way it did after the first unlock, or if the November tranche -- nearly four times the size of Thursday's -- produces a proportionally larger and more durable decline.
