Some big names saw sizable paper gains on their SpaceX stakes when the stock went public, but trading has been volatile since then
SpaceX stock is now trading above the company's initial public offering price. But most shares held by insiders are still locked up.
SpaceX shares are rising, and that's good news for some high-profile companies and public figures whose stakes in the company have been revealed.
The release of 13-F and other regulatory filings late last week showed how much money notable entities had tied up in SpaceX $(SPCX)$ as of the end of June. Alphabet, $(GOOG)$ $(GOOGL)$, for instance, owns about 7.2% of SpaceX's outstanding shares as of June 30, according to an Aug. 14 filing.
Meanwhile, Peter Thiel, who first invested in SpaceX in 2008, disclosed a 5.5% stake through funds associated with his Founders Fund as of June 30. Nvidia (NVDA), which works closely with Musk and SpaceX, owned $21 billion worth of SpaceX shares at the end of last quarter. Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund also disclosed a $26.3 billion stake as of June 30.
Even Harvard's endowment was revealed to have $2.2 billion worth of SpaceX shares as of the end of the second quarter.
Most shares owned by insiders are subject to a complicated, staggered lockup schedule that allows certain amounts of stock to be released at a time. The first of those releases was on Aug. 6, two days after SpaceX reported second-quarter earnings. The second is expected to occur on Aug. 21, or Friday, according to RBC analysts.
The lockup schedule means that investors who held pre-IPO stakes in SpaceX were barred from selling stock until at least Aug. 6, if not later.
While those early investors saw sizable paper gains when SpaceX went public, it's been a rockier ride since then. At their high, SpaceX shares traded 67% above June's initial-public-offering price of $135. But at their lowest point, shares traded 22% below the listing price.
Now SpaceX's stock is continuing to climb back above the IPO price, changing hands at $147 on Monday, up 5% on the day.
The stock is likely to "continue to trade on demand for tokens," or pieces of AI data, wrote UBS analysts led by John Hodulik. They pointed to SpaceX's "leverage" from its latest frontier AI model and its position as a provider of computing power. Hodulik rates SpaceX's stock a buy with a $210 price target.
SpaceX last week unveiled Grok 4.6, which is roughly on par with OpenAI's GPT-5.6 Sol model but is not as strong as Anthropic's top Claude models. The Grok model's biggest advantage is likely its cost per token, which has been the subject of debate across the industry.
It's about 60% cheaper to buy 1 million tokens using Grok 4.6 than it is to use leading models from rivals, according to Artificial Analysis, which runs an AI leaderboard. The firm said Grok 4.6 is comparable to Kimi K3, the open model developed by Beijing-based Moonshot AI and which briefly caused a technology-stock selloff upon its release.
"Token demand is rising super fast," SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said Monday on X, which is owned by SpaceX.
On Friday, SpaceX closed the $60 billion acquisition of Cursor, an AI-coding startup. Deutsche Bank analyst Edison Yu said in a Monday client note that Cursor will help expand SpaceX's reach to enterprise customers, which stands well below that of Anthropic and OpenAI. Yu rates SpaceX's stock a buy with a $235-per-share price target.
-William Gavin