Short Sellers Reap $8.7 Billion Windfall as SpaceX Stock Stumbles on Technical Setbacks and Lockup Anxiety
Published on 07/20/2026 at 22:03 | Redaktion boerse-global.de
The spectacle of a freshly minted public company losing nearly half its value in five weeks is rare. SpaceX has managed just that since its blockbuster June IPO, and the carnage has been a goldmine for short sellers. With the stock trading at €106.34 — barely 1% above its 52-week low of €105.28 — bearish bets against the aerospace giant have swelled to roughly 30% of the float, yielding unrealized profits estimated at $8.7 billion. The sell-off has been relentless: from a peak market capitalization of $2.64 trillion in mid-June, the company has shed over $1 trillion in value, settling at $1.63 trillion.
The financial pain has been exacerbated by a string of operational hiccups. In a span of days, two of SpaceX's flagship launch vehicles — the workhorse Falcon 9 and the next-generation Starship — both suffered aborted starts. On Monday, a Falcon 9 mission from Vandenberg Space Force Base aborted after all nine Merlin engines briefly ignited and then cut off. It was the first such failure in more than a year, and the abort scuttled what would have been the 85th Falcon 9 mission of the year. A few days earlier, the Starship's 13th test flight was scrubbed at ignition: four of 33 Raptor-3 engines failed to light, and at least two must be replaced. SpaceX has targeted a fresh attempt in the coming days. The twin mishaps have rattled a market already on edge about the company's operational reliability.
Uncertainty around future revenue streams is not helping. A rumor, originating from Taiwan's Economic Daily, claimed SpaceX had placed a $52 billion order with Foxconn for 13,000 server racks packed with Nvidia GB300 chips — a deal that would have involved as many as 936,000 GPUs. CEO Elon Musk swiftly dismissed the report as "fake news" on his social media platform X, though the denial paradoxically lifted SpaceX shares about 1% in premarket trading. (Dell and Super Micro Computer, which would have been squeezed out as suppliers, also rose modestly.) Meanwhile, SpaceX is reportedly in talks with the Pentagon for a multi-billion-dollar contract to supply AI computing capacity from its own data centers. Comparable existing agreements — $1.25 billion per month from Anthropic through May 2029 and roughly $920 million per month from Google starting in October — annualize to about $26 billion. But the company's first-quarter 2026 results showed a loss of $1.27 per share on revenue of $4.69 billion, underscoring that the road to profitability remains long.
Should investors sell immediately? Or is it worth buying SpaceX?
Wall Street analysts remain surprisingly bullish despite the rout. JPMorgan's Doug Anmuth rates the stock a buy with a $225 target, Needham's Ryan Koontz sees $250, and Raymond James's Brian Gesuale goes as far as $800. Piper Sandler, however, initiated coverage on July 16 with a neutral rating — the lone cautious voice in a chorus of buy recommendations that average $235–$244. That consensus sits far above the current price, but the sheer dispersion of targets highlights the uncertainty.
A more tangible overhang is the impending release of 1.37 billion shares — roughly 20% of the float — which will become freely tradable on August 17, after the company reports second-quarter earnings. Such lockup expirations often trigger further selling pressure, especially when sentiment is already fragile. The stock's annualized volatility of 91% and a relative strength index of 35.1 suggest it is deeply oversold, though not yet at extreme levels.
Gavin Baker, managing partner at Atreides Management and an early SpaceX backer, dismissed the sell-off on CNBC as a typical post-IPO shakeout. "This is normal for newly public names," he said. "What matters is the long-term tech franchise." The market will get a chance to test that theory later this week if the Starship successfully launches and — more critically — if SpaceX can reassure investors that its launch cadence is back on track.
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