Wall Street Bets $26 Billion Against SpaceX Ahead of Its First Earnings and a Massive Share Unlock This Week

SpaceX has become the most heavily shorted large public company in the United States, with Wall Street investors wagering more than $26 billion that Elon Musk’s rocket and satellite company’s stock will keep falling after losing roughly half its value over the past month.

Short interest in SpaceX shares reached 219.3 million shares as of July 29, according to data compiled by S3 Partners, equal to roughly 34% of the company’s tradable float. That bearish position, worth approximately $24.6 billion as of that date, has continued climbing since, surpassing $26 billion according to more recent figures, and now exceeds the value of short bets placed against Tesla, the other major public company led by Musk. Short interest has grown dramatically since SpaceX’s debut, rising from just 23.3 million shares when the data was first reported on June 16 to more than nine times that level roughly six weeks later.

SpaceX completed the largest initial public offering in history on June 11, pricing 555.6 million shares at $135 and raising $75 billion, a figure that climbed to $85.7 billion once underwriters exercised their overallotment option. The offering was more than double the size of Saudi Aramco’s 2019 listing, which had previously held the record. Shares opened at $150 the following morning and closed their first trading session 19% above the offer price. Four days later, the stock touched an intraday high of $225.64, valuing the company at roughly $2.1 trillion and briefly making Musk the world’s first trillionaire.

The reversal since that peak has been steep. SpaceX and Tesla together shed a combined $1.2 trillion in market value during July alone. Notably, the stock’s decline continued even after Starship’s 13th test flight succeeded on July 25 in what analysts described as a near-flawless mission and one of the company’s clearest operational wins since going public, an outcome that would typically be expected to boost investor sentiment rather than coincide with a new low.

Short sellers have continued adding to their positions rather than locking in gains as the stock has fallen, even as their paper profits have grown substantially. Bloomberg estimated short sellers’ unrealized gains at $3.88 billion on July 15; a day later, when the stock first traded below its offer price, Ortex Technologies put the figure at $8.7 billion. By July 22, that estimate had climbed to $15.5 billion, meaning nearly $12 billion in paper gains accumulated within a single five-session stretch. According to S3 Partners, short sellers had booked approximately $7.3 billion in mark-to-market profits since the stock began trading in June, making SpaceX the second-most profitable short trade of 2026, trailing only Tesla.

Daniela Hathorn, a senior market analyst at Capital.com, attributed the stock’s decline to a combination of factors rather than any single catalyst. “The stock’s retreat seems to be a combination of profit-taking, valuation reassessment and the unwinding of extremely bullish positioning following one of the most anticipated listings in recent years,” Hathorn said, according to a Reuters report.

Two major catalysts loom in the days ahead that could determine whether short sellers extend their gains or face a sharp reversal. SpaceX is scheduled to report its first quarterly earnings as a public company on Aug. 4, followed two days later, on Aug. 6, by the expiration of the company’s initial post-IPO lockup period. At that point, approximately 911.5 million shares held by early investors, company executives and other insiders, worth roughly $116 billion, will become eligible for sale for the first time, a development that could flood the market with additional tradable shares and pressure the stock further if a meaningful portion of insiders choose to sell.

Ahead of those events, Morgan Stanley has warned that SpaceX is entering what the firm characterized as its most dangerous stretch since going public, citing the potential for approximately $100 billion in market value to become newly available for trading in the coming weeks. The bank has projected SpaceX will report second-quarter revenue of approximately $6.75 billion and an adjusted loss per share of 35 cents, while estimating Starlink’s global consumer subscriber base has reached approximately 12 million households.

Investors have grown more cautious partly because of concerns beyond SpaceX’s core rocket and satellite businesses. The company raised $25 billion through the bond market last month specifically to finance expansion of its artificial intelligence infrastructure, a move that added to broader market unease about aggressive AI-related capital spending across the technology sector, particularly given questions about how quickly that spending will translate into corresponding revenue growth, especially if interest rates remain elevated.

SpaceX is not alone in attracting heavy bearish bets this year. According to S3 Partners, several other major technology companies with significant artificial intelligence exposure, including Alphabet, Amazon, Microsoft, Nvidia, Broadcom and Micron, also rank among the year’s most heavily shorted stocks, reflecting broader investor concern about elevated valuations and heavy capital spending commitments tied to the AI infrastructure buildout across the sector.

Despite the scale of the current bearish positioning, most Wall Street analysts covering SpaceX have maintained largely bullish long-term ratings on the stock, even as they acknowledge that the combination of Thursday’s earnings report and the subsequent lockup expiration could inject significant additional volatility into the shares in the days immediately ahead.