SpaceX shares are under renewed pressure as another wave of stock lockup expirations hits the market, pushing the price back down near its IPO level. Approximately 319 million shares held by early employees and investors became eligible for trading on Thursday, marking the 70th tranche in a staggered lockup release schedule that will ultimately free up about 88% of SpaceX's total 13 billion shares by 2027.
The stock tumbled as much as 5% in early trading, dipping below the $135 IPO price. This comes after the company successfully weathered a much larger lockup expiry earlier this month. On August 6, as many as 911.5 million shares were unlocked and cleared for market trading, and the stock absorbed that selling pressure before staging a strong rally to the upside.
Even bigger supply challenges loom on the horizon. A massive block of 1.3 billion shares is expected to unlock around early November when SpaceX releases its third-quarter earnings report, followed by another 180-day lockup expiry in December. Meanwhile, CEO Elon Musk's substantial holding of 6.42 billion shares remains locked up until June 2027, providing some long-term stability to the share count.
In other SpaceX-related news, reports surfaced that the company had been in talks to acquire AI firm Cognition, the developer behind the AI coding agent known as Devin. However, both Cognition and CEO Elon Musk have denied these reports. Musk responded directly to Cognition CEO Scott Wu's denial on social media, stating: "Scott is telling the truth. We have had no discussions with Cognition other than making sure Grok meets their needs."
The rumor emerged shortly after SpaceX completed its blockbuster $60 billion acquisition of Cursor, another AI coding company. Wall Street analysts, including Deutsche Bank's Edison Yu, are bullish on the Cursor deal. In a research note, Yu outlined three core benefits of the acquisition: "1) Direct access to numerous blue-chip enterprise clients, as many top companies already use Cursor at scale; 2) A proprietary data flywheel, with over 1 million real users generating code interactions that provide high-quality reinforcement learning training data for models; 3) Vertical integration of the application layer (Cursor), frontier large language models (Grok), and massive compute capacity, with compute output expected to exceed 2 gigawatts this year."
Yu maintained his buy rating and $235 price target on the stock without an upgrade, but he did raise the team's full-year earnings per share estimate by 11% and overall revenue projection by 1%, reflecting optimism about the strategic benefits of the Cursor acquisition.
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