SpaceX stock was jumping again Monday -- chasing its highest close for a month after snapping a 4-week losing run on Friday with a 16% surge following the end of a lockup period for shares.
The Elon Musk-led satellite and AI company's shares rising 1.9% to 135.63 as investors regained appetite for the stock, which has had a torrid time since its closing high of $201.80 on June 16 -- reached shortly after its IPO on June 12. It has tumbled around 30% from that record through Friday's close.
Wall Street had widely braced for severe selling pressure on Thursday, when SpaceX's first lockup expiration freed roughly 911 million restricted insider shares. However, the expected massive wave of insider dumping failed to materialize. The lack of selling pressure caught short sellers off guard, triggering a wave of short-covering and dip-buying from sidelined institutional investors.
Before the unlock, only about 5% of SpaceX's shares traded freely on the open market, causing severe illiquidity and high volatility. Expanding the free float to more than 1.5 billion shares eased trading bottlenecks, allowing large institutional funds to accumulate bulk positions without spiking order execution costs.
Citi reiterated its $200 price target for the stock in a note Monday and revised its guidance for 2026/27 higher-seeing approximately $1 trillion revenue by 2031. SpaceX said it expects to hit that milestone by 2030.
The Citi analysts said they see "greater confidence in management's vision than consensus."
The stock is currently up for three consecutive days, rising 25.7% over than span and it's on target for its highest close since the $139.14 it hit on July 13.
Market sentiment was also energized last week by news that SpaceX and Tesla announced the specifics of a joint $16.8 billion investment to build Terafab, a semiconductor factory, in Grimes County, Texas. The specialized facility is designed to produce in-house AI chips to power both Tesla's robotics and SpaceX's space-based computing data center network.
Given the reaction to the end of the first lockup period, Wall Street will be approaching the next cautiously -- and investors only have to wait 10 days. It comes before the market opens on Aug. 20 and will unlock an additional 7% of restricted shares held by employees and general pre-IPO holders onto the open market.
If that sparks the wave of insider offloading expected last time round, expect stock volatility to resume.