SpaceX's post-IPO plunge sets tense backdrop for first earnings report
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- SpaceX has shed over $500 billion in market cap since its June 12 IPO, with shares at $108.37 on Friday — more than 50% off intraday highs and on a fourth straight weekly loss.
- Short sellers were up roughly $8.3 billion in paper profits since the IPO as of Friday, per S3 Partners' Matthew Unterman, who called it "among the most aggressive and quickest bearish builds" heading into a mega-cap's first earnings.
- SpaceX carries a $1.4 trillion market cap with a price-to-sales ratio in the 70s, burns billions per quarter, holds nearly twice as much debt as cash, and faces rolling lock-up expirations beginning in coming days.
- Starship completed its 13th test flight on July 24 from Starbase, Texas, but the Super Heavy booster suffered a "hard splashdown" after only a subset of engines relit for the landing burn.
- SpaceX agreed to acquire AI-coding startup Cursor for $60 billion (expected to close Q3 pending regulatory approval) and signed a deal to supply Google with $920 million per month in AI compute, with Anthropic already leasing capacity at the Colossus 1 data center in Memphis.
- Analysts at Bernstein ($239 target), Cantor ($246), and New Street Research ($165) all recommend buying, with Bernstein writing "the quarterly results should not matter" — only management's projected confidence on the growth path.
Why it matters: Rolling lock-up expirations starting in the coming days give early investors their first chance to sell, risking a fresh wave of supply onto an already-battered stock. Even bulls framing this as a buying opportunity ($165–$246 targets) concede the print itself is secondary — what matters Tuesday is whether management can project conviction on Starship reusability, the Cursor close, and the Google/Anthropic compute revenue stream.
