SPCX Gives Back Its Inclusion Bid as the Lockup Clock Starts Ticking

The Index Bid Was Already Spent

SpaceX joined the Nasdaq-100 before Tuesday's open, just 15 trading days after its June 12 debut — an accelerated inclusion made possible by a rule change. The problem for anyone buying the index-flow narrative: that passive bid was front-run into Monday's close and Tuesday's open. By the time inclusion was official, the QQQ and QQQM trackers had done most of their buying, and the stock had round-tripped back to around its ~$150 opening. This is textbook buy-the-rumor, sell-the-news — with a float small enough to make the flows underwhelming in the first place. SpaceX priced at $135 at a ~$1.8 trillion valuation, leaving less than 5% of the company in public hands. A trillion-dollar market cap sitting on a sliver of a float means even $800B of index trackers only need to buy a rounding error.

The Supply Clock Starts Ticking

The bigger overhang isn't the fading index bid — it's supply. The first insider lockup starts unwinding when SpaceX reports Q2 results later this month, releasing roughly 20% of the locked pool, followed by ~7% tranches in August, September and October, with the remainder clearing in December. There's also a price trigger: about 10% of locked shares unlock if the stock reaches $175.50, a 30% gain over the $135 IPO price. That inverts the usual setup — strength itself invites sellers, so $175.50 now reads as a soft ceiling rather than a target. The one holder not part of this is Elon Musk, whose 6.4 billion shares stay locked until June 2027 with no early-release provision.

The Lone Bear vs. the Street

Into that supply backdrop, the sell side is almost uniformly bullish — which is exactly why the one bear stands out. MoffettNathanson's Julie Zhu initiated at Neutral with a $131 target, about 18% below Monday's $160.42 close, writing that a "flashing red Sell" would have been defensible and calling SpaceX's roughly $30 trillion addressable-market claim "absurd." On the other side, Wedbush's Dan Ives initiated Outperform at $190. At $149, the tape is trading closer to the bear case than the bull case. With the inclusion catalyst now behind it and the first lockup only weeks away, the path of least resistance is the supply, not the story.