XSPC
The shorts showed up in force
SpaceX, trading as SPCX, is dealing with a very public case of investors betting against the house. CNBC says nearly 185 million shares are now sold short — about 29% of the public float — which is a giant leap from roughly 5% to 7% just three weeks ago.
That’s not a normal little wobble. That’s the market basically saying, “we’d like to speak to the manager.” According to S3 Partners’ Matthew Unterman, short sellers have kept building speculative positions since the IPO, turning the stock into a fresh battleground.
Below the IPO line? Oof.
The big gut punch: SPCX dropped below its $135 IPO price on Wednesday for the first time. The stock is down about 20% in July, and the latest slide lines up with a last-second abort of a Starship test — the kind of headline that doesn’t exactly scream smooth launch trajectory.
For traders, that matters because IPOs are supposed to be the cleanest kind of narrative stock: shiny, exciting, and going up forever in a PowerPoint slide. But once a newly public name loses its first line in the sand, the vibe changes fast.
Why you should care
- Short interest ballooned from about 40 million shares to 185 million shares.
- The bearish crowd now has roughly $25 billion riding on more downside.
- SPCX is on a six-day losing streak, even if the longer-term chart still looks wildly above its 50-day and 200-day averages.
Big picture: this is what happens when a rocket ship meets the public market’s mood swings. SpaceX still has a moonshot story — but right now, traders are acting like they’d rather bet on turbulence.