SpaceX insiders are finally about to get the chance to offload their shares onto the public market — but they would have been able to sell even more if the company’s stock had performed better.
Up to 911.5 million shares held by SpaceX insiders — meaning employees, early investors and others — will be made eligible for sale on Thursday. That’s a big deal: It’s the first timesince December 2025that some investors can offload their stock, allowing them to cash in on the company’s initial public offering.
Thursday is “the first real opportunity to turn paper wealth into real, hard cash that they can actually spend,” said Evan Mills, a financial advisor at Scholar Advising who works with current and former SpaceX employees.
For some, it’s also a “somber moment,” Mills told MarketWatch. While SpaceX-ers can stand to “change their lives” by liquidating their stakes, they may also feel like they’re “giving up on the mission and the vision” of the company, he noted.
In a client note on Wednesday, bullish Morgan Stanley analyst Adam Jonas said some $100 billion worth of SpaceX shares will be unlocked, calling the event a chance to buy exposure to a “potential generational compounder.” Sellers, though, won’t be as well off as they could have been just a few weeks ago.
SpaceX’s stock is now trading well below its $135 IPO price. Shares closed at $108.27 a share on Wednesday after investors were disappointed by the company’s first-ever public earnings call. SpaceX has shed well over $1 trillion from its peak market capitalization, and the stock hasn’t traded at the $135 level since July 16, which means that a separate tranche of up to 455.8 million shares will stay locked up.
Usually, companies going public allow insiders to begin selling their stock after 180 days. But SpaceX decided to use a more complex approach that gradually allows more insider-owned shares to become eligible for sale over time, rather than all at once. Another 7% of shares, for example, are set to be unlocked on Aug. 21.
“If it was a cliff lockup expiration, that would be one hell of a lot of stock that potentially would come on the market at once,” said Jim Lebenthal, chief markets strategist at Cerity Partners. “And selling could beget selling. It could be a waterfall event.”
How the market will react to the first stock release isn’t immediately clear, but SpaceX shares will likely be volatile, according to experts. That said, J.P. Morgan analyst Doug Anmuth wrote in a client note that he believes there has already been “significant prepositioning” by investors ahead of Thursday’s share unlock. That could weaken the impact of any selling.
Expiring lockups also mean that SpaceX’s float — the number of shares available for public trading — will go up. Anmuth said Thursday’s event alone could more than double the size of SpaceX’s very small float, which currently stands at just 5% of outstanding shares.
And as float increases, so does SpaceX’s float-adjusted weighting in major indexes, which can drive purchases from passive investors. That won’t happen right away, said Lebenthal, but it could “eventually” offset insider sales.
Morningstar, which has acquired the Center for Research in Securities Prices, won’t adjust a company’s float “until at least” the end of the lockup period. Nasdaq said it accounts for free-float factor changes once a quarter; its next adjustment will be made effective on the third Friday of September,according to its methodology.
SpaceX’s 180-day lockup period won’t end until early December. A separate extended lockup that impacts shares held by SpaceX CEO Elon Musk and other select shareholders will be in place until next June.
Ben Rosbach, a wealth advisor at Gerber Kawasaki Wealth & Investment Management, told MarketWatch that he often talks with SpaceX employees about how to manage the volatility that has dominated the company’s stock since its IPO. He said that further volatility is likely as more tranches of locked-up shares get released.