SpaceX Enters First Earnings Report Down More Than 50% from Post-IPO High

SpaceX is set to deliver its first quarterly earnings report as a public company on Tuesday, arriving against a backdrop of sustained stock declines that have erased more than $500 billion in market capitalization since the company's June 12 debut on public markets.

The stock closed Friday at $108.37, more than 50% below its intraday high and coming off its fourth consecutive weekly loss. SpaceX's market cap currently sits at approximately $1.4 trillion, a figure analysts note is not supported by conventional financial metrics.

The company's price-to-sales ratio, based on trailing revenue, is in the 70s. The business is burning billions of dollars per quarter and carries nearly twice as much debt as cash on hand.

Comparisons to Facebook's 2012 IPO have emerged among market observers, though the scale differs considerably. Facebook also stumbled out of the gate and trended lower for months, eventually bottoming at less than half its offering price — but Facebook's total market cap after its first trading day was roughly $100 billion, or approximately one-fifth the amount of value SpaceX has shed since its own initial pop.

Short sellers have profited significantly from the decline. As of Friday, shorts were up approximately $8.3 billion in paper profits since the IPO, according to Matthew Unterman, head of research at S3 Partners. "It's among the most aggressive and quickest bearish builds we have seen in a mega-cap name heading into its first earnings report post-IPO," Unterman said.

Adding pressure is the prospect of new share supply entering the market. Rolling lock-up restrictions on early investors are set to begin expiring in the coming days, giving insiders their first opportunity to sell.

Not all analysts are bearish. Ben Harwood of New Street Research, which initiated coverage of SpaceX just before the IPO with a $165 price target, said the selloff has created an opening for long-term buyers. "For a long-term investor we think this is an attractive entry point," Harwood wrote. "The growth runway is enormous, and SpaceX has one of the widest moats in the market today."

Much of the investment thesis for SpaceX centers on CEO Elon Musk and his stated ambitions to build data centers in orbit, eventually send humans to Mars, and develop AI services to compete with Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic. SpaceX's connectivity business — its Starlink satellite internet service — is currently the company's only profitable segment. Its launch business continues to lose money.

The company's next-generation Starship rocket sits at the center of the bull case. SpaceX has said it expects Starship to "commence payload delivery to orbit" in the second half of this year, and the fully reusable rocket is designed to dramatically lower the cost of sending cargo and people into space while expanding the Starlink constellation.

Starship's 13th test flight took place on July 24 from SpaceX's Starbase, Texas launch facility. The Super Heavy booster separated from the Starship spacecraft roughly two minutes into flight and came down in the Gulf of Mexico, but SpaceX acknowledged the landing was not clean. The booster "attempted to relight its engines for the landing burn," the company said, but only a subset ignited before a "hard splashdown."

Analysts at Bernstein flagged Starship progress as the single most important issue for justifying SpaceX's valuation, alongside semiconductor availability, regulatory approvals from the Federal Aviation Administration, and orbital compute capacity.

SpaceX's earnings report lands two weeks after Tesla's quarterly results were panned by Wall Street, with investors citing soaring costs, negative free cash flow, and a cautious tone from Musk on scaling the company's Robotaxi service. With Tuesday's report, SpaceX will face similar scrutiny — and a shareholder base that has already absorbed substantial losses in less than two months as a public company.

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