SpaceX sets earnings date, triggering first big share unlock

SpaceX‘s stock gained 3% on Tuesday, snapping a seven-day losing streak after setting its maiden earnings report, which coincides with a major share lock-up expiration.

Elon Musk‘s aerospace and defense contractor on Monday announced Aug. 4 as its debut earnings report after its record initial public offering. The date also triggers the company’s unique lock-up period, which allows insiders to begin selling shares earlier than the typical 180-day period.

SpaceX took a staggered approach, allowing insiders to sell portions of their stock at earlier intervals to prevent massive selling and price volatility. The first earnings report paves the way for investors to sell 20% of their eligible locked-up stock, a total of up to 911.5 million shares, on the second full trading day immediately following the first earnings release date, Aug. 6.

An additional 10% could be freed up if the stock closes at least 30% above the IPO price for five of the ten trading days heading into the report.

As of Monday’s close, SpaceX shares had shed nearly half their value from the company’s intraday high of $225.64 per share on June 16, or 43% from its all-time high closing price of $211.39 on that same day.

Musk’s net worth, which had soared above $1 trillion as of June 12, stood around $786 billion on Monday, according to Forbes’ Real-Time Billionaires Index.

In recent weeks, the stock has also become a prime target for short sellers, with bearish positioning last reaching about a third of the company’s public float.

Given the lock-up, only a small portion of shares are available for trading, and short sellers have been ramping up their bets as the stock plummets. Musk blasted the group in a post to social media platform X on Monday.

“The survival probability of firms who maintain a significant short position in SpaceX over time is very low,” he wrote.

SpaceX is planning to launch a Falcon 9 rocket carrying 24 Starlink satellites into low orbit on Tuesday after scrubbing the mission before takeoff on Monday.

This was the second cancelled launch from SpaceX in a week. The company plans to launch its massive Starship rocket on Thursday after halting the mission last week due to an engine ignition failure.

“Some of the engines didn’t start, triggering an automatic launch abort,” Musk said in a post on the SpaceX-owned social network X. The company said it was modifying the rocket’s propulsion system to address the engine issues.

Investors are watching Starship test flights closely after SpaceX raised a record $85.7 billion in the biggest initial public offering ever in June, pricing shares at $135.

The giant rocket — which is the largest ever built or flown — is key to SpaceX ambitions to scale its Starlink satellite internet service, and key to fulfilling various obligations to the Artemis program of U.S. space agency NASA, which aims to bring astronauts back to the lunar surface in 2028.

Musk has also called Starship the “holy grail” of space travel, and wants to see it someday used for space tourism and manned missions to Mars.

Investors are also watching SpaceX’s growing array of cloud computing contracts. The company acquired Musk’s AI venture, xAI, now called SpaceXAI, in February, becoming the owner and operator of sprawling data centers and a power plant in Greater Memphis.

Google, Anthropic and Reflection have signed up to rent excess compute capacity from SpaceXAI, as xAI company is now known, at those facilities. The company is also reportedly in talks to provide the Pentagon with compute capacity.

Musk’s first publicly traded company, Tesla, is expected to report earnings after the bell on Wednesday. Institutional investors have submitted some questions ahead of time to Tesla leadership via the Say Technologies website.

Among SpaceX-related topics, Tesla investors want to know how the two companies plan to collaborate on the Terafab, a chip factory that Musk is planning to build out in Grimes County, Texas, where Tesla is expected to lead R&D and SpaceX is expected to lead production.

As CNBC has previously reported, many fans of Musk want to see his empire consolidated and to see SpaceX and Tesla merge at some point. SpaceX COO and President Gwynne Shotwell told CNBC doing so would make Musk’s life easier.