SpaceX stock SPCX is heading toward another potentially volatile milestone next week, with hundreds of millions of additional shares set to become eligible for sale just as the company’s shares are regaining momentum and its artificial intelligence ambitions continue to attract bullish attention.
The September 9 lockup expiry will mark the 90th trading day since SpaceX’s initial public offering and allow roughly 319 million additional shares held by select insiders to become eligible for sale.
The event will be closely watched because SpaceX has already demonstrated that a large increase in the potential supply of shares does not necessarily translate into a sharp selloff.
The company cleared its first and largest lockup expiry on August 6 without the anticipated collapse in its stock.
More than 900 million shares held by early investors became liquid at the time, but instead of plunging, SpaceX shares rebounded above their $135 IPO price within days.
The stock subsequently rallied about 35% in the five trading sessions following the expiry, adding roughly $500 billion to SpaceX’s market value.
Shares are now trading around $149, roughly where they opened on their first day of trading at $150, and are about 20% higher than immediately after the first lockup event.
September 9 could bring another supply shock
The September 9 event will be the third lockup expiry for SpaceX, following another release on August 20.
A final lockup expiry is scheduled for December 8.
The staggered schedule is designed to prevent a sudden flood of shares from overwhelming the market.
However, each release creates a fresh question for investors: will insiders and early shareholders take advantage of the liquidity, or continue holding their stakes and betting on Elon Musk’s long-term ambitions?
That question could be particularly important for early employees and investors sitting on enormous unrealized gains.
An employee who received SpaceX shares when the company was valued at $10 or $20 a share could potentially realize life-changing wealth by selling even a portion of their holdings at around $150.
At the same time, the fact that the stock absorbed more than 900 million newly liquid shares in August without collapsing could encourage investors to believe that demand remains strong enough to absorb additional supply.
SpaceX shares rose 6.4% on Thursday, briefly moving above $150 for the first time since July 10.
The stock closed at $149.74, giving the company a market capitalization of just over $2 trillion, according to Dow Jones Market Data.
Analysts remain bullish on SpaceX
The recent rebound has also been supported by a largely positive analyst view.
SpaceX has an average price target of $225.87 a share, according to FactSet data, implying roughly 50% upside from current levels.
According to The Wall Street Journal, 28 analysts rate the stock Buy, while three have an Overweight rating, seven have a Hold rating, one has an Underweight rating and only two have a Sell rating.
Price targets remain unusually wide, however, ranging from $75 to as high as $800.
Oppenheimer analyst Timothy Horan is among those who remain optimistic.
Oppenheimer raised its price target for SpaceX to $280 from $250 on Tuesday while maintaining an Outperform rating, an almost 90% upside from current levels.
Horan believes SpaceX could be a major beneficiary of the shortage of artificial intelligence infrastructure and argues that the company’s AI revenue is growing faster than expected as it develops increasingly capable models.
SpaceX “has the ability to bring on infrastructure faster than anyone else, and is using this infrastructure and its data to improve its own models faster than anyone else,” Horan wrote in a note to clients on Wednesday, while maintaining a Buy rating.
Investor Ross Gerber is even more bullish on SpaceX’s long-term prospects.
The president and CEO of Gerber Kawasaki said he sees greater potential in SpaceX than Tesla and believes the two Musk-led companies could eventually merge.
Gerber said SpaceX, Starlink and xAI are among the company’s biggest attractions and argued that xAI is also critical to Tesla’s future.
“In essence, Tesla doesn’t own its own operating system. It’s owned by SpaceX,” Gerber told CNBC.
Asked whether investors would be better off owning SpaceX than Tesla, Gerber replied, “SpaceX is better to me.”
The AI opportunity comes with a huge spending bill
The bullish argument, however, faces one significant obstacle: the enormous amount SpaceX is spending to build its AI infrastructure.
SpaceX’s capital expenditure reached $28.5 billion during the first six months of 2026, a 308% increase from the same period a year earlier.
It spent $18.4 billion on capital projects in the second quarter, 86% of which went towards AI.
Morgan Stanley expects the company to spend as much as $64 billion on AI infrastructure this year, substantially more than earlier estimates.
SpaceX is building data center capacity both for its own AI needs and potentially for external customers.
The company owns the Grok AI model through its acquisition of X and is attempting to build an infrastructure business around the rapidly growing demand for computing power.
The opportunity could eventually become another major source of revenue. But the economics remain uncertain.
SpaceX generated $7.8 billion in sales in the second quarter, meaning its capital expenditure was more than twice its quarterly revenue.
The company has argued that investors should not be overly concerned because it expects the investments to pay for themselves relatively quickly and remains on track to reach $100 billion in annualized revenue by the end of 2026.
Can SpaceX turn AI spending into profits?
The key question is whether the enormous investment in computing capacity will translate into sustainable revenue.
According to regulatory filings, SpaceX’s ability to fund some of the spending depends heavily on compute agreements with companies such as Anthropic and Google.
Those arrangements can reportedly be terminated with only a few months’ notice.
There is also uncertainty over whether SpaceX’s AI models can win enterprise customers away from established players such as Anthropic and OpenAI.
Its ambitions to eventually build AI data centers in space add another potentially transformative opportunity, but that project appears to be several years away.
Stifel analyst Jonathan Siegmann has dismissed some of the concerns surrounding SpaceX’s spending.
“Skeptics will push back that planned capex is higher … but we believe this all reflects the red-hot AI data capacity demand signal – you’ve got to spend money to make money, and SpaceX is accelerating its capacity investments accordingly,” he said in a client note this month.
For investors, however, the valuation makes the spending debate more consequential.
SpaceX currently trades at a price-to-sales ratio of around 65, according to The Motley Fool, compared with roughly seven for the broader technology sector.
That premium assumes that the company will successfully convert its investments in Starlink, AI infrastructure and other businesses into dramatically higher revenue and profits.
Uncertainty remains before the next lockup
The September 9 lockup expiry therefore presents a complicated setup.
For existing shareholders, the combination of strong analyst support, rising shares and the stock’s ability to withstand the August supply shock may offer little immediate reason to sell.
For prospective investors, the equation is less straightforward.
A large number of shares becoming eligible for sale could create volatility, while the company’s extraordinary capital spending and premium valuation leave little room for execution mistakes.
The bullish case rests on SpaceX becoming much more than a rocket company — combining Starlink, AI models, computing infrastructure and potentially other Musk-led businesses into a sprawling technology platform.
The bearish case is that investors are already paying for that future before the economics of some of these businesses have been proven.
Jim Cramer summed up the long-term bullish argument last month.
“SpaceX could be a 100-year piece of paper,” the CNBC Mad Money host said, comparing it with century-long railroad bonds that rewarded patient investors over generations.
“Maybe you put some away for the next generation or even the one after that.”
For insiders, meanwhile, the decision may be less philosophical.
Even the strongest believers in SpaceX’s future could rationally choose to diversify after accumulating gains that can transform their personal finances.
That makes the September 9 expiry less a simple test of whether investors believe in SpaceX and more a test of how much of that belief insiders are willing to express by continuing to hold their shares.
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