SpaceX short interest overtakes Tesla's — $24.6B bet ahead of Aug. 4 earnings, Aug. 6 lockup
SpaceX's short interest has ballooned to 219.3 million shares — about 34% of shares available for public trading — as of July 29, up more than ninefold from 23.3 million when first tracked on June 16, according to S3 Partners data cited by Bloomberg. The $24.6 billion bearish bet now exceeds short positions against Tesla itself, with traders bracing for SpaceX's first quarterly earnings as a public company on Aug. 4 and its first post-IPO lockup expiration two days later.
Bloomberg reports that SpaceX's short interest has surged sharply over the past six weeks. According to S3 Partners data, short positions stood at 219.3 million shares as of July 29 — about 34% of the stock available for public trading — more than nine times the 23.3 million shares recorded when the metric was first tracked on June 16.
In dollar terms, the bearish bet against SpaceX, now worth $24.6 billion, has surpassed the value of short positions against Tesla — even though Elon Musk is CEO and largest shareholder of both companies, suggesting bears have shifted more of their firepower toward SpaceX.
Short sellers are positioning ahead of two closely spaced catalysts: SpaceX's first quarterly earnings report as a public company on Tuesday, Aug. 4, and its first post-IPO lockup expiration just two days later on Aug. 6, when 20% of restricted shares — roughly 911.5 million shares — become eligible for sale.
SpaceX shares traded around $108.89 on July 31, down 2.95% for the day — the stock has fallen about 30.9% over the past month and 19.4% over the past year.
For its first call as a public company on Aug. 4, SpaceX is collecting shareholder questions through a Grok-powered Q&A tool built by Elon Musk's xAI — underscoring how central the AI venture has become across his companies.
According to Reuters, SpaceX is running its own investor question portal at questiontime.ir.spacex.com ahead of the Aug. 4 call, opting for an in-house Grok-powered tool built by xAI instead of the industry-standard Say Technologies platform — keeping issuer (SpaceX), AI layer (xAI) and distribution (X) all inside Musk's ecosystem. The most-upvoted retail investor questions skewed away from financial metrics, focusing instead on requests for more footage of Starship's Human Landing System for NASA's Artemis moon program, while Wall Street is modeling roughly $6.9 billion in quarterly revenue and a $0.28 per-share loss.
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