SpaceX stock: what the filings say before the lock-ups end

SpaceX stock has been on sale to anyone with a brokerage account since 12 June 2026. Class A shares, ticker SPCX, on Nasdaq, priced at $135 in what was reported as the largest initial public offering ever done (CNBC and Wikipedia, read 22 September 2026). The filing puts the money raised, after the banks' fees and costs, at $85.7 billion. It closed at $148.68 on 25 September, 10% above the offer.

So the question is no longer how to get in before the IPO. It is what you are buying, and who else is allowed to sell it to you, and when. Both answers are on the SEC's site, free, and almost nobody has read them.

What the price has done

Closing prices from our price table and Interactive Brokers' daily bars, read 26 September 2026.

Anyone who bought at the offer is up 10%. Anyone who bought at the close on the first day is down 8%, and anyone who bought the top four days later is down 26%. That is normal for a new listing, and it is the first thing to know about buying one: the IPO price is not a floor, and the first week is not a price, it is a mood.

When the locked shares can be sold

Before a listing, the people who already own the company (employees, early investors, the founder) sign a lock-up: they promise not to sell for a while. SpaceX's prospectus lets them out in slices, on dates written down in advance, and the banks running the offering can also let shares out early.

About 1.9 billion shares have already been let out, starting on 6 August, two trading days after the first results. These are the ones still to come, from the final prospectus of 11 June:

The December slice is the bigger of two versions. A smaller one needed the stock to close at $175.50 or more, 30% above the offer, on five of the ten trading days up to the first results on 4 August. The highest close in that window was $125.33, so those shares wait until December.

The biggest slice before December has no date. SpaceX had not announced when it reports the third quarter when I checked on 26 September, and the 1.3 billion shares follow on the second full trading day after it.

A release is permission, not a sale. Nobody has to sell on the day. What you can say is that more shares may be sold on known dates. One insider sale is already on file: on 22 September Gwynne Shotwell, the president, sold 342,170 shares for about $52.5 million under a trading plan she set up in June (Form 4, filed 24 September).

The three months in the filing

SpaceX's first quarterly report as a public company went to the SEC on 4 August 2026. For the quarter to 30 June:

Source: Space Exploration Technologies Corp., Form 10-Q for the quarter ended 30 June 2026, filed 4 August 2026 (accession 0001628280-26-052535), via the SEC's XBRL data.

Revenue nearly doubled in a year and the loss nearly halved. The operating line is almost break-even: minus $143 million on $7.8 billion of revenue, which is a rounding error away from a company that pays for itself. Below it sit $629 million of interest costs, less $340 million of interest earned, which is what turns a small operating loss into a real one.

Read the research line before you read anything else. $3.55 billion in one quarter, 45% of revenue, up 81% on last year. This is a company choosing to spend its gross profit on building the next thing. You can call that visionary or reckless; what you cannot call it is hidden.

The balance sheet after the listing

Source: the same 10-Q. Equity was $2.6 billion at 31 December 2025.

Cash went from $24.7 billion at the end of December to $93.5 billion. The IPO brought in $85.7 billion, and six months of building spent part of it. Equity went from $2.6 billion in December to $34.5 billion in March, before the listing, and $127.2 billion in June: a recapitalisation first, then the offering. Either way, the company now has nearly a hundred billion in the bank.

Two lines are worth pausing on. $14.3 billion customers have already paid for launches and service not yet delivered, up $2.2 billion in six months. Money paid in advance is the best kind of debt a company can owe. And $47.5 billion of contracted revenue not yet recognised, the backlog, disclosed in the same filing. That is six quarters of revenue already signed.

Against that, $28.5 billion spent on property and equipment in six months against $3.5 billion of cash from operations. SpaceX is spending roughly eight dollars on new capacity for every dollar the business generates, and the money raised is what pays for the difference. Most of it is not rockets: $23.6 billion went to the AI segment, and the filing says the rise came from building data centers, against $2.2 billion for Space. That is the trade the shareholder made: dilution now, capacity later, and most of the capacity is computers.

What came with the ticker

On 2 February 2026 SpaceX bought xAI, which had bought X, the former Twitter, in March 2025. The same person controlled both sides, so the accounts treat them as one company all along: the prospectus says every earlier period was restated to include xAI and X, so the 92% growth above is like for like. Goodwill was $11.8 billion in December and $11.6 billion in June; the merger did not add to it.

Then it kept buying. Mesh Optical closed on 6 July for about 3.8 million shares. On 14 August SpaceX completed its merger with Anysphere, the company behind the coding tool Cursor, paying 389.3 million new Class A shares on an implied value of $60.0 billion (8-K, filed 14 August). Both came after 30 June, so neither is in the numbers above. The third-quarter report will be the first with Cursor inside it.

So SPCX is not a pure rocket company. It is a rocket and satellite business that also owns a frontier AI lab, a social network and a coding tool, and the litigation section of the 10-Q already carries lawsuits against X and over Grok. If you bought the ticker for Starship, you also bought that. This is exactly the kind of thing a filing tells you and a headline does not, and it took me ten minutes to find.

What this says about the next one

The years of "how do I buy SpaceX before the IPO" produced nothing a normal investor could act on. The day it listed produced a price, and seven weeks later a quarterly report anyone can open, with a backlog in it. The chart has since been 20% below the offer and 49% above it. The waiting was not the opportunity. The filing is.

The same will be true of the next big listing. Until a company files, the secondary platforms quoting a price per share are quoting a market of a few thousand accredited buyers, not a company's numbers. I wrote about that shape in the Anthropic post.

Reading a newly listed company, in order

1. Price against the offer. Where is it now, and what was the range?
2. The lock-up table. It is in the prospectus under "Shares eligible for future sale". Known dates, known sizes, and several slices that wait for a results day.
3. Revenue and its growth, then the loss. A shrinking loss on doubling revenue is a different animal from a steady loss on flat revenue.
4. Cash against cash burn. SpaceX has $93.5 billion and spent $28.5 billion on equipment in six months. Divide one by the other: it tells you whether the next raise is years away or months.
5. What came with the ticker. Subsidiaries, acquisitions since the listing, dual share classes, who controls the votes.
6. Then a price. Not before.

Every company we cover, listed last week or listed in 1962, gets the same page: the accounts from the filings, and the price against what those numbers would be worth at its industry's multiple and its own. The Stock Deep Dive shows you that page for a company you own.

Educational and proprietary. This explains what our research does, not the exact formula behind it, and it is not personalised investment advice. See the full disclaimer.