SpaceX stock slips as 319 million new shares come to market

On Thursday, SpaceX's stock experienced a decline, slipping back to its initial public offering (IPO) price of $135 as 319 million new shares became available for trading. This latest tranche, known as the Day 70 unlock, represents roughly 88% of SpaceX's total 13 billion shares that will be released by 2027. The stock opened lower, falling approximately 5% in early trade, and dipped below the IPO price.

Despite this setback, the company had recently navigated a significant share unlock on August 6, which saw up to 911.5 million shares becoming tradable. This unlock earlier in the month had led to a 6% rise in the stock's price, demonstrating a bullish sentiment. However, additional share unlocks are still on the horizon, including a 1.3 billion-share tranche that is set to become tradable around the company's third-quarter earnings in early November.

Following the latest unlock, discussions about a potential acquisition of Cognition, an AI company featuring a coding agent called Devin, emerged. However, both Cognition and Elon Musk, SpaceX's CEO, denied these reports. Earlier this year, SpaceX finalized a $60 billion acquisition of Cursor, another AI coding company, which has received positive reviews from Wall Street analysts.

Analysts believe the Cursor deal offers three key benefits: 1) presence across numerous blue-chip enterprises already utilizing Cursor on a large scale, 2) access to a proprietary data flywheel generated by 1 million real-world users, and 3) the ability to vertically integrate the Cursor application/harness layer with Grok, a frontier model, and a substantial amount of compute capacity.