SpaceX Lockup Test Passed, but a 13-Billion-Share Supply Wave Is Still Coming

The most anticipated lockup expiry in IPO history was supposed to be a binary event: 911 million SpaceX shares would unlock, early investors would rush for the exits, and a stock already down 50% from its June high would crater. Instead, on August 6, the stock rose 6%.

What actually happened tells us more about market plumbing than about SpaceX’s fundamentals. And it sets up a much larger question for the next year: whether the AI IPO wave is about to reverse a decade of buyback-driven equity scarcity.

The Lockup That Didn’t Break

Roughly 911 million SpaceX (SPCX) shares became eligible for sale on August 6 — about 7% of shares outstanding, and more than the 639 million sold in the IPO itself.^[1] The stock had already fallen from a post-IPO peak above $225 to a closing low of $108.27 the day before, slipping below its $135 IPO price.^[1] The setup looked ugly enough that one institutional broker, R.F. Lafferty CEO Robert Hackel, called it “the most talked-about lockup in the history of IPO lockups.”^[2]

Then the bell rang. About 7 million shares crossed at the open at roughly $107 — roughly three-quarters of a billion dollars in a single print — and shares that “would never really touch the open market” were absorbed by waiting buyers.^[3] The stock closed 6% higher.

The explanation is less dramatic than the fear. D.A. Davidson analyst Gil Luria noted the stock had slid almost every day for three to four weeks ahead of the event — from around $152 on July 9 toward $110 — as event-driven and hedge funds sold in anticipation, then covered their shorts once the expiry passed.^[3] Tigress Financial Partners CIO Ivan Feinseth described it as “a largely technical event that accelerates the transition of ownership from insiders to a deeper, more stable public float, rather than a signal of deteriorating fundamentals.”^[3]

SpaceX’s own history also mattered. The company ran semiannual internal buyback rounds for employees long before the IPO, so many insiders had already taken partial liquidity over the past decade. “These are not people waiting to get their first dollar back,” a former employee told Fortune.^[3] One seller who did go public: Atlanta Falcons safety Jessie Bates III, who acquired shares for $150,000 in 2022 and told CNBC he planned to sell his entire stake, now worth over $1.5 million at the current valuation, to “lock in gains.”^[1]

The Staggered Schedule: 12.9 Billion Shares Still to Come

Thursday’s unlock was just the first tranche. SpaceX replaced the standard 180-day lockup with a staggered, rolling release schedule designed to meter — not block — insider selling.^[4] The structure, as outlined in the prospectus:

Sources: SpaceX prospectus via Morningstar^[4]; Reuters^[2]; CNBC^[1]

Elon Musk, who controls about 42% of the equity and 85.1% of voting power, is locked up until June 2027 — a full year after the IPO.^[2][4] Executive officers face their own longer lockup that generally doesn’t begin expiring until after fourth-quarter results.^[2]

There is also a performance-based trigger: if the stock trades 30% above its IPO price for at least five of ten trading days leading up to earnings, investors can sell an additional 10%.^[4] That provision did not activate this quarter, given the stock was trading below its IPO price by the time earnings arrived.

The point is that Thursday was a soft opening of the supply valve, not the end. Each subsequent unlock date is likely to make trading more turbulent, as Falcon Wealth Planning’s Gabriel Shahin acknowledged: “each of the upcoming lockup expiry dates is likely to make trading more turbulent,” with options prices already at “sheer insanity” levels.^[2]

The Bigger Structural Question: From De-Equitisation to Dilution

The SpaceX lockup drama is a microcosm of something far larger. For a decade, US companies bought back so much of their own stock that share counts shrank, scarcity pushed prices higher, and this “de-equitisation” added roughly 0.7% per year to US equity returns, according to research from Ninety One’s Investment Institute.^[5]

Now the mechanism may be reversing. The AI IPO wave — led by SpaceX, with Anthropic and OpenAI expected to follow — will flood the market with new share issuance. SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic raising $200 billion to $250 billion at listing is about 0.3% of a roughly $75 trillion market: real money, but not enough to move it immediately, as Ninety One’s Sahil Mahtani and Daniel Morgan noted.^[5]

The bigger risk sits further out. Companies typically float only about a quarter of their shares at IPO. Within the first two years, that tends to grow to around 70% as lockups expire and secondary offerings hit.^[5] Applied to SpaceX, Anthropic, and OpenAI, that could mean close to $4 trillion in additional shares reaching the market — a 4% expansion of US public equity.^[5]

Ninety One modelled three scenarios:

Source: Ninety One Capital Markets Assumptions^[5]

The range is wide — from 2.7% to a negative 2.2% annualized over a decade — and the outcome depends on whether earnings grow fast enough to absorb the supply. But the direction is clear: the de-equitisation tailwind that underwrote the bull market is ending. “Over the next ten years, US equity returns are going to have to come from elsewhere,” Mahtani and Morgan wrote.^[5]

Index providers are compounding the effect. Nasdaq implemented rule changes that allowed SpaceX to join the Nasdaq-100 just 15 trading days after its IPO, with relaxed float and market-cap requirements.^[5][4] That forces passive funds to buy at whatever weight the float dictates — and a rising float means rising forced demand, even as the same rising float expands the supply those funds must eventually absorb.^[5]

The IPO Pipeline Behind the Supply Wave

The staggered SpaceX lockup is the leading edge, but the pipeline is deepening:

• Anthropic is meeting with potential investors ahead of a possible IPO as early as September or October 2026, according to a person familiar with the process.^[6]
• OpenAI filed for a US IPO but has not held pre-IPO meetings or set an official timeline, with CEO Sam Altman reportedly viewing a valuation below $1 trillion as a “nonstarter” and leaning toward a 2027 listing.^[6] Prediction-market traders on Kalshi now price an OpenAI IPO announcement by March 1, 2027.^[6]
• Fundrise Innovation Fund (NYSE: VCX) accelerated its post-listing lockup expiration from September 14 to August 13, 2026, concluding the lockup had achieved its purpose of supporting orderly price discovery.^[7]
• Berkshire Hathaway spent approximately $4.5 billion buying back its own shares in Q2 2026 and purchased nearly $20 billion of equities — a reminder that buyback demand hasn’t disappeared, even as issuance rises.^[8]
• Carpenter Technology (NYSE: CRS) announced an additional $1.0 billion share repurchase program after completing its prior $400 million authorization.^[8]

The buyback engine is still running, but the question Ninety One poses is whether new issuance will eventually swamp it — the way Chinese share supply swamped MSCI China index investors in the 2010s, with stocks typically added at a premium averaging close to 78%.^[5]

Market Plumbing: Overnight Guardrails and Reg NMS

While the supply side evolves, the plumbing is being retrofitted. Several developments landed in the last few months:

• Overnight price bands: The SEC noticed the 27th Amendment to the National Market System Plan to Address Extraordinary Market Volatility, establishing temporary price band protections for overnight trading — a recognition that 24-hour trading is now a structural reality, not an experiment.^[9]
• Reg NMS amendments: The SEC proposed changes to the trade-through rule and locked/crossed markets provisions of Regulation NMS, addressing how orders interact across venues in an increasingly fragmented landscape.^[9]
• Treasury clearing: ICE Clear Credit’s Treasury clearing rules and liquidity risk management framework received SEC approval on July 24, part of the broader push to harden the plumbing around the world’s safest collateral.^[9]
• CFTC emergency authority: On August 11, the CFTC exercised emergency authority after KalshiEX notified the Commission of a market emergency, ordering the exchange to continue operating under the Commodity Exchange Act’s Core Principles.^[9]
• IOSCO liquidity consultation: The international securities regulators’ body published a May 2026 consultation on market liquidity evolution during the trading day — a signal that regulators globally are studying intraday liquidity patterns as 24/7 trading pressures build.^[9]

None of these is a headline-grabbing event on its own. Together, they show regulators racing to update rules written for a market that traded 6.5 hours a day into one that increasingly trades around the clock, with mega-IPOs flooding float into index funds that must buy mechanically.

What to Watch Next

1. August 20 SpaceX tranche: The next ~319 million shares unlock. If the stock holds or rises again, the “priced-in” thesis strengthens. If it sells off materially, the question becomes whether the first expiry’s calm was a one-time short-covering artifact.

2. SpaceX Q3 earnings and the performance trigger: The performance-based early-release provision (additional 10% if the stock trades 30% above IPO price for 5 of 10 days before earnings) will be live again. With the stock below IPO price, this is dormant — but a recovery changes the calculus.

3. Anthropic IPO pricing: If Anthropic prices in September or October, it will be the second mega-AI listing to test whether the market can absorb a large float expansion. The structure of its lockup — standard 180-day or staggered like SpaceX’s — will signal whether the staggered model is becoming the new template.

4. OpenAI’s 2027 timeline: A delayed OpenAI listing extends the supply wave into next year but keeps the overhang. If OpenAI accelerates, the market faces two mega-IPOs hitting float expansion simultaneously.

5. Buyback pace vs. issuance: Berkshire’s $4.5 billion Q2 buyback and Carpenter Technology’s new $1 billion authorization show corporate demand is intact.^[8] The Ninety One thesis turns on whether that demand is enough to offset the coming supply. Track S&P 500 buyback announcements against IPO and secondary offering volume through the fall.

6. Reg NMS and overnight trading rules: The SEC’s proposed amendments are in public comment. Any acceleration of the timeline — particularly around overnight price bands — would affect how new shares from lockup expiries are absorbed in extended-hours sessions, where SpaceX has traded its most volatile stretches.

The base case is that the market absorbs the SpaceX supply wave the way it absorbed the first tranche — with pre-positioning, matched block trades, and enough long-term demand to absorb the flow. The 60/40 read favors that outcome. But the 40 case — that a staggered supply schedule meeting a rising-issuance environment eventually overwhelms the buyback bid — is not a tail risk. It is the central question for US equity returns over the next decade, and the answer starts to arrive on August 20.