SpaceX shares closed at $114.92 Thursday, up 6.14%, on the same session that roughly 911.5 million insider-held shares became legally free to sell for the first time. The day was widely expected to crush the stock. It did the opposite.

Here is what the “unlock” actually means. When a company goes public, its employees, founders and early backers agree not to sell their shares for a set stretch of time so the newly listed stock isn’t buried under a wall of selling on day one. That freeze is called a lockup. SpaceX’s first big thaw was scheduled for Thursday, two trading days after its debut quarterly report, and it released about 911.5 million shares — more than the 638.9 million the company sold in its June initial public offering. The freely tradable slice of SpaceX went from roughly 4.9% of all shares outstanding to about 11.8%, more than doubling overnight. JPMorgan had estimated the float could swell by roughly 143%.

More sellers usually means a lower price. That is why the date had been circled on calendars for weeks, and why the stock had been sliding into it.

The setup was ugly. SpaceX reported its first results as a public company Tuesday afternoon, with revenue up 92% to $7.81 billion and a narrower loss, but capital spending on artificial intelligence infrastructure came in far heavier than investors wanted to see. The stock fell hard Wednesday, dropping nearly 14% to close at $108.27 — an all-time low and its second-worst day since listing. Thursday opened weak too, sinking to $105.11 in the morning, within a couple of dollars of its record low, before turning around and running as high as $115.75.

Volume told the story of a real fight. About 252.4 million shares changed hands, roughly 109% above the three-month average of 121 million.

The more telling signal came from the options market, where large investors were making a different kind of bet than they had been making all summer. Until Thursday, the crowd in SpaceX options had been buying cheap upside calls — lottery tickets that pay off if the stock rockets, and expire worthless if it doesn’t. That flow had been a reliable contrarian marker, and the stock kept falling anyway.

Thursday’s biggest trades ran the other way. Of roughly $600 million in options premium traded by midday, $316 million was in puts, with about $166 million tied to selling them rather than buying them, according to SpotGamma data. Selling a put means collecting cash today in exchange for agreeing to buy the stock at a set price if it falls that far. It is a bet that the downside is largely finished, and it is a tactic favored by investors with deep pockets, because the seller has to be willing and able to own the shares.

Two of the day’s largest dollar trades combined that with an upside bet — sell a put well below the current price, use the proceeds to buy a call well above it. One such trade struck shortly after the opening bell effectively wagered that SpaceX will not be another 20% lower ten months from now, while paying off if the stock doubles. A second, smaller version went off in the afternoon: someone sold $3.5 million of puts struck at $75 expiring in January 2028 and bought the same number of calls struck at $185 for the same date, paying about $5 million for the calls — meaning that investor was willing to write a check rather than pocket cash to hold the position.

That combination is what traders on the floor call a risk reversal, and it carries a plain message: the seller believes $75 is a price this stock will not see, and $185 is a price it eventually will.

None of this settles the argument. SpaceX remains the most shorted name on the U.S. market, with bearish positions running above 30% of the tradable float and short interest measured in the tens of billions of dollars — larger in dollar terms than Tesla’s. Some of Thursday’s strength almost certainly came from those bears buying shares back to close out positions, not from fresh conviction. The stock is still about 29% below its $135 IPO price and roughly half of the $225.64 it touched in its first week of trading in June, leaving the company at a market value near $1.5 trillion.

More supply is coming. Thursday’s release was the opening tranche of a staggered schedule that keeps adding shares through December, with a second large wave tied to third-quarter results. Elon Musk’s own block of roughly 6.4 billion shares stays frozen until June 2027.

Elsewhere in the sector Thursday, Rocket Lab rose 1.14% to $75.67 while AST SpaceMobile slipped 1.49% to $67.36.

JBizNews Desk | Wall Street

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