Why Is SpaceX (SPCX) Stock Moving Today?

SpaceX priced its IPO at $135 a share on June 12, 2026, selling roughly 556.6 million shares to raise about $75 billion at a valuation near $1.75 trillion — the largest initial public offering in history. The stock has traded mostly below that IPO price in the weeks since; as of early August it closed around $115, roughly 15% below the IPO price and well off its June 16 peak, as the market worked through both genuine excitement about the company and the mechanics of a newly public mega-cap finding its trading range.

One of those mechanics landed on August 6, 2026: SpaceX's first post-IPO lockup expired, making 911.5 million additional shares eligible to trade and more than doubling the public float from about 4.9% to 11.8% of shares outstanding. Conventional wisdom says a float-doubling unlock should pressure a stock lower as insiders gain the ability to sell; SpaceX instead rose 6.1% that day, and one prominent skeptic of the rally, Gary Black, argued publicly that buying the dip ahead of the unlock made no sense given the scale of new supply about to hit the market.

The other major storyline is corporate, not operational: SpaceX is working to close its $60 billion all-stock acquisition of AI coding startup Cursor (developer Anysphere), announced June 16, 2026 and widely described as the largest acquisition of a venture-backed startup ever. The deal folds Cursor into SpaceX's AI push, built around the xAI merger, and Anysphere shareholders are set to receive SpaceX Class A shares priced off the volume-weighted average closing price over the seven trading days before close. Reports on August 7 said the deal could close as soon as the following week, though it remains subject to regulatory approval — antitrust scrutiny is plausible given SpaceX's dominant positions in launch, satellite internet, and now AI compute. Deutsche Bank cut its valuation estimate on the stock to $235 from $255 in early August, a reminder that even a trimmed Wall Street target still sits well above where SPCX has actually traded since the IPO.

A separate, ongoing storyline is Starship itself. Flight 13 on July 24 hit its main objectives — deploying 20 Starlink V3 satellites and splashing down both the booster and upper stage in controlled fashion — and Elon Musk has since said the vehicle's long-running heat shield problem looks solved. But recovering the actual splashed-down upper stage from rough seas in the Indian Ocean has proven difficult: SpaceX said on August 7 that recovery was not looking good, though the team did capture close-up photos of the heat shield and engines before conceding the attempt.