It’s SpaceX Lock-Up Day. Here’s What to Know With Millions of Shares Now Eligible to Trade

Crystal KimThu, August 6, 2026 at 9:00 AM UTC

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SpaceX’s first lock-up expiry lands today, when more than 911 million shares will be free to trade.Credit: Photo by Kevin Carter / Getty ImagesKey Takeaways -

Some investors are eyeing Thursday’s expiration of lock-up agreements that will let some SpaceX investors sell shares for the first time.

That’s expected to put pressure on the stock, which is already below its IPO price. Experts, however, think some of the worries about how much pressure may be overstated.

Shares of SpaceX fell yesterday after the company reported its first-ever quarterly results. Some expect them to fall even further Thursday.

Why do they think that? Because that’s when about 911 million shares of SpaceX (SPCX) stock—about $98 billion worth at recent prices—will be released from trading restrictions, which expire two days after the company’s first earnings report as a publicly traded entity.

Such events, called lock-up expirations, follow initial public offerings and tend to have a negative effect on the stocks with which they’re associated because they give early investors an opportunity to sell their shares, often for the first time.

The expirations come at an inauspicious time: Shares of SpaceX as of yesterday’s close are off about 20% from their IPO price and 52% below their post-IPO peak. Some observers think further pressure is inevitable. But experts suggest that investors think carefully about what the end of SpaceX lock-ups will mean in practice. Here are some of the topics they flagged to Investopedia.

SpaceX’s stock was fast-tracked into a number of indexes, which means its performance will be factored into portfolios that own funds based on those measures.

First off, the expiration of a lock-up doesn’t necessarily mean that all the newly tradable shares will actually be sold. That’s for the owners to decide; just because insiders and early investors can trade their shares doesn’t mean they will.

There could be less pent-up selling desire in this case because SpaceX, unlike many private companies that issue restricted stock units, has given them other opportunities to sell, according to Kristin McKenna, president at boutique RIA Darrow Wealth Management. The company had a tender offer in January, meaning some shareholders were able to extract value even before SpaceX’s IPO.

“People have been able to sell along the way,” she said.

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SpaceX’s locked-up shares, meanwhile, won’t all arrive on the market at one time. Companies use staggered expirations to stem a “huge dump of supply into the market,” according to Kat Liu, vice president at IPOX Schuster, a Chicago-based index provider specializing in IPOs.

That means instead of one large tranche of shares arriving at once—which, when it does happen, typically does on the 180th day after an IPO—SpaceX and other companies have opted to release them in relative trickles. During the Covid era, Liu said, Airbnb (BNB), Doordash (DASH), and Snowflake (SNOW) did just that. That could give the market time to absorb the new supply.

Thursday marks the first of a wave of upcoming expirations for SpaceX. The shares being released represent a large slice, or roughly a fifth, of the pie that’s locked up through the 180th day following its mid-June IPO; roughly 4.7 billion shares in total are locked up through that day, which taken together would boost SpaceX’s current shares outstanding by 35%.

SpaceX’s post-IPO swoon means a big tranche of shares the lock-up of which was tied to a price milestone won’t get released soon. Nearly 456 million shares were due to be released today if the price was “at least 30% greater” than the IPO price for at least five of 10 consecutive trading days through Aug 4. Since that trigger didn’t fire, that tranche won’t get released until the 180th day after June 11, which points to early December.

The company has another set of lock-up expirations that follow, the last of which occurs after its second quarter earnings in 2027. Elon Musk and Alphabet (GOOGL) have shares that would be unlocked in that wave.

Liu has a few key lock-up expiration dates circled on her calendar, including the second full trading day that follows SpaceX’s third-quarter earnings report, which is expected in November, though the company has not yet set a date. On that day, 1.3 billion shares are due to be released. Liu doesn’t foresee a massive lock-up related hit to the stock this week.

“It could happen,” she said. “But I don’t expect it to be like an explosion of selling.”

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Source: “AOL Money”