SpaceX stock plunges 13.6% after first quarterly report

SpaceX shares tumbled more than 13 percent on Wednesday, August 5, 2026, a day after the company released its first quarterly earnings report as a publicly traded entity. The stock closed at $108.10, a drop of 13.6 percent from Tuesday’s close of $125.33. Investors reacted sharply to a surge in capital expenditure, which reached $18.37 billion—a six-fold increase from the prior year and well above the $13.2 billion analysts had expected. The bulk of that spending, $15.8 billion, is allocated to artificial intelligence infrastructure, including specialized compute, storage, networking, and software systems for building and operating AI models at scale. SpaceX aims to expand its data center capacity from 1.4 gigawatts to 2 gigawatts by the end of the year. The heavy AI investment has unsettled shareholders across the tech sector, who are increasingly demanding visible returns. Josh Gilbert, lead analyst at eToro, noted that the same scrutiny has hit Big Tech this earnings season, with investors questioning open-ended spending. He added that SpaceX faces an extra challenge because it is asking shareholders to fund data centers in orbit. SpaceX has stated that its computing capacity supports its Grok models and is actively sold, with $14.1 billion in cloud-services agreements lined up. The company’s connectivity business provided a bright spot, with revenue jumping 66 percent year-over-year as Starlink subscribers doubled to 12 million, generating $1.66 billion in operating income. The stock faces another test on Thursday, when the first post-IPO lock-up period expires, making up to 911.5 million shares—roughly 20 percent of restricted holdings—eligible for sale. Melissa Otto, head of Visible Alpha research at S&P Global, told Al Jazeera that the stock is likely to be volatile once the lock-up lifts. SpaceX’s IPO was priced at $135 per share and climbed to $225 within days of its June 12 debut, briefly making Elon Musk the world’s first trillionaire, but the stock has since declined.