SpaceX’s post-IPO plunge sets tense backdrop for first earnings report

Since its first trade on June 12, SpaceX has lost over $500 billion in market cap, a stunning blow to retail investors who jumped into Elon Musk’s rocket company at their first opportunity. The stock is coming off its fourth straight weekly loss and is more than 50% off its intraday high.

Not since Facebook’s IPO in 2012 have tech investors seen such a high-profile offering lead to such early disappointment. Facebook stumbled out of the gate and trended lower for months before bottoming at less than half its IPO price. But Facebook’s total market cap after its first day of trading was about $100 billion, or roughly one-fifth the amount of value SpaceX has shed since its initial pop.

That’s the backdrop for SpaceX’s first earnings report as a public company, which is scheduled to land after the bell on Tuesday. It comes two weeks after Tesla’s earnings were panned by Wall Street due to soaring costs, negative free cash flow and Musk’s cautious tone on scaling the company’s Robotaxi service. Last week tech’s hyperscalers wrapped up their quarterly updates, which had investors laser focused on artificial intelligence spending.

For SpaceX, the story is more complicated than for its trillion-dollar peers. So much of the investment thesis is a bet on Musk, and his mission to build data centers in space soon and eventually colonize Mars, while trying to develop AI services to rival Google, OpenAI and Anthropic.

Unlike the other megacaps, SpaceX’s market cap, currently sitting at $1.4 trillion, isn’t supported by any of today’s financial metrics. Its price-to-sales ratio, based on trailing revenue, is in the 70s, the business is burning billions of dollars a quarter and the company has almost twice as much debt as cash.

Weighing down SpaceX’s stock is the possibility that a flood of new shares will hit the market as rolling lock-up restrictions expire, starting in the coming days, giving early investors their first opportunity to sell.

In the meantime, short sellers have been cleaning up by betting on the drop. As of Friday, shorts were up about $8.3 billion in paper profits since the IPO, according to Matthew Unterman, head of research at S3 Partners.

“It’s among the most aggressive and quickest bearish builds we have seen in a mega-cap name heading into its first earnings report post-IPO,” Unterman said in an email.

Ben Harwood, an analyst at New Street Research, said that while “the shares have been volatile since the IPO,” the downturn has presented a buying opportunity.

“For a long-term investor we think this is an attractive entry point,” Harwood wrote in an email. “The growth runway is enormous, and SpaceX has one of the widest moats in the market today.”

New Street initiated coverage of SpaceX just before the IPO with a $165 target price. The shares closed on Friday at $108.37.