SpaceX's Post-IPO Rollercoaster: A 15.7% Weekly Rebound Masks Deep Divisions on the AI Bet
Published on 08/10/2026 at 08:31 | Redaktion boerse-global.de
The first earnings season of SpaceX's public life has delivered everything investors feared and nothing they expected. A brutal post-results selloff that erased billions in market value has given way to a ferocious rebound, leaving the stock roughly 26 percent above its August 3 low of 91.04 euros — yet still about 40 percent adrift of the 194.46-euro peak touched in June.
Friday's session captured the whiplash perfectly. Shares surged 15.66 percent to close at 115.14 euros, capping a weekly gain of 15.84 percent. Over the trailing 30 days, however, the equity remains down 9.48 percent — a reminder that the recovery, however vigorous, has only partially repaired the damage from the initial shock of the company's first quarterly report as a listed entity.
The Numbers Beat, Then the Stock Sank
The paradox of the past fortnight is that SpaceX's debut earnings were, by any conventional measure, excellent. Second-quarter revenue climbed 92 percent year over year to 7.8 billion dollars, comfortably ahead of the 6.9 billion consensus. The per-share loss of 0.09 dollars was a fraction of the 0.26 dollars analysts had braced for, and adjusted EBITDA nearly tripled to 3.5 billion dollars — a 191 percent expansion. The company still posted a net loss of 541 million dollars, but the trajectory was unmistakably positive.
Wall Street's initial response was anything but. When results landed on August 4, the stock tumbled as much as 14 percent, with Elon Musk's net worth taking an estimated 87-billion-dollar single-day hit, according to Forbes. The culprit was not the income statement but the balance sheet. SpaceX plowed 18.4 billion dollars into capital expenditures during the quarter, with 15.8 billion of that earmarked for AI infrastructure. That spending spree, combined with the announcement of a joint 16.8-billion-dollar commitment with Tesla to build the "Terafab" chip complex in Grimes County, Texas — a facility spanning more than 100 million square feet with potential expansion to 119 billion dollars — spooked investors who had not priced in such an aggressive capital deployment.
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A Lock-Up That Refused to Bite
The other great fear of the summer — the expiration of the insider share lock-up — proved to be a non-event. When 911.5 million shares became tradable on August 6, lifting the free float from 4.9 percent to 11.8 percent of shares outstanding, the anticipated avalanche of selling never arrived. Instead, the stock gained 6.14 percent that day on volume 109 percent above the three-month average. Historical precedent supported the outcome: studies of lock-up expirations over four decades show an average share-price reaction of just minus 1.5 percent on the day, as markets typically price in the additional supply well in advance.
That resilience has not deterred the bears. Short interest has climbed to 36 percent of the free float, signaling that a substantial cohort still expects the stock to fall. The next test arrives on August 20, when another 7 percent of shares become unrestricted, with further tranches releasing through December 8.
The Analyst Spectrum: From 75 to 800 Dollars
The post-earnings debate has produced one of the widest target-price dispersions on record. Morgan Stanley's Adam Jonas leads the bulls with a 300-dollar price objective and an Overweight rating — a 125 percent premium to the recent US closing price of 133.11 dollars. Jonas argues that the AI business alone accounts for more than half of the company's fair value, buttressed by a 100-billion-dollar cash reserve and a 47.5-billion-dollar order backlog.
Goldman Sachs sits at 220 dollars with a Buy rating, drawing an explicit comparison to Palantir, which it rates only Neutral. Wells Fargo (215 dollars), Cantor Fitzgerald (246 dollars), and Needham (250 dollars) all lean positive, as does Argus Research, which upgraded from Hold to Buy on August 7 with a 160-dollar target, citing 247 percent AI revenue growth to 2.56 billion dollars and fresh cloud contracts worth 14.1 billion dollars in the second quarter plus another 6.7 billion dollars booked early in the third.
Piper Sandler remains the most cautious major voice at 140 dollars with a Neutral stance. The consensus across 31 analysts sits at 229.54 dollars, but the individual targets span an extraordinary range from 75 to 800 dollars — a dispersion that speaks to genuine uncertainty about how the AI buildout will ultimately translate into shareholder returns.
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Starlink Carries the Weight
The bull case rests heavily on the satellite business, which is already delivering the profitability that the AI segment cannot yet claim. Starlink's subscriber base has doubled over the past year to 12 million, producing an operating profit of 1.66 billion dollars on connectivity revenue that grew 66 percent to 4.29 billion dollars. Investor David Friedberg has called Starlink a "cash machine" with potential annual revenue of 40 billion dollars. Musk's own projections are characteristically more ambitious: he has suggested that capturing a quarter of the communications market outside China could generate over 500 billion dollars in revenue, with more than a trillion dollars possible if Starlink handles over half of global internet traffic.
The AI division, by contrast, lost 1.3 billion dollars operationally in the quarter despite its rapid revenue growth. Management has reaffirmed its target of reaching a 100-billion-dollar annualized revenue run rate by the end of 2026, but skeptics note the scale of the investment required to get there. Analysts estimate capital needs of at least 400 billion dollars through 2028 to hit the company's 20-gigawatt AI computing goal, and the stock trades at roughly 17 times current-year revenue. With a market capitalization of approximately 1,516.79 billion euros and 30-day annualized volatility near 90 percent, the valuation leaves little room for execution missteps.
The recovery from the post-earnings trough suggests investors are willing to give management the benefit of the doubt on the long-term growth story. Whether that patience survives the next several quarters of heavy spending and continued losses in the AI segment is another matter entirely.
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