SpaceX dives 10% after AI spending surge rattles investors
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- SpaceX shares dropped over 10% in premarket trading on Wednesday after its first earnings report as a public company disclosed Q2 capital expenditures of $18.4 billion — a sixfold increase — with the majority directed toward AI.
- The stock closed Tuesday at just over $125, sitting below its $135 IPO price and well off its $200+ all-time high hit shortly after listing.
- CFO Bret Johnsen defended the spending on the earnings call, calling SpaceX "efficient" and claiming the company is achieving "less than a one-year payback" on AI compute deployment.
- Elon Musk raised SpaceX's revenue forecast, projecting $1 trillion in annual revenue by 2030 versus a previous 2031 target, even as the company narrowed losses for the quarter.
- SpaceX is positioning itself as an alternative cloud provider by renting out computing capacity built with Nvidia chips, though its own AI models are viewed as behind OpenAI and Anthropic.
- Insider lock-ups expire Thursday, allowing company insiders to sell a portion of their shares — a potential additional drag on the stock following the post-earnings decline.
- Steve Westly, founder of The Westly Group and former Tesla board member, told CNBC investors are still asking how quickly SpaceX can grow and how high costs will climb before profitability.
Why it matters: SpaceX is now trading below its $135 IPO price, and with insider lock-ups expiring Thursday, potential insider selling stacks on top of the post-earnings selloff. The market is pricing in skepticism about the $18.4B AI capex spike — testing whether investors will accept SpaceX's pivot from pure-play space company to AI cloud provider built on Nvidia capacity, or demand the same returns proof now being demanded of Big Tech.
