Individual investors have been the most loyal holders of SpaceX stock since it went public, until now. Retail investors sold a net $4.5 million of SpaceX (Nasdaq: SPCX) shares on Friday, August 7, marking their first day of net selling since the company’s blockbuster June 12 initial public offering (IPO), according to Vanda Research data. It is a small figure, but a symbolically notable one after weeks in which retail bought the stock every single trading day.
For a crypto audience, the development is worth tracking for two reasons. First, SpaceX is the underlying asset for the tokenized SpaceX stocks that trade on-chain, so sentiment and price in the shares feed directly into that corner of the market. And second, SpaceX is itself a significant corporate crypto holder, having disclosed a Bitcoin treasury worth about $1.1 billion in its first earnings report on August 4, 2026. The cooling of retail enthusiasm in the stock, in other words, ripples into crypto from more than one direction.
What Vanda Reported
The reversal stands out mainly because of how consistent the prior buying had been. According to Vanda Research, retail investors had been net buyers of SpaceX every trading day since the IPO, with their largest single-day net purchase reaching $144.6 million on June 16. Even the stock’s first earnings report failed to shake them: on August 5, as SpaceX fell 13.6% after results, retail investors stepped in with one of their heaviest buying days on record, treating the drop as an opportunity.
Friday’s $4.5 million of net selling broke that streak, but analysts cautioned against reading it as capitulation. “A shift from persistent net buying to selling is rarely about one catalyst,” said Sam North, a market analyst at eToro cited by Reuters, describing it instead as a mix of profit-taking, position fatigue, and investors reassessing risk and reward. He noted that retail turned sellers while the shares were rebounding back toward the IPO price, behavior that “looks more like investors using strength to take some money off the table than panic selling.”
The Price Round-Trip
The selling caps a dramatic few weeks for the stock. SpaceX priced its IPO at $135 on June 12 in a record-setting debut, then surged to an intraday high of $225.64 on June 16, about 67% above the offer price, briefly lifting its market value above $2.6 trillion. From there it retraced sharply, slipping below the IPO price intraday on July 15 and closing beneath it every day since July 16. In early August the stock fell as much as roughly 22% below its debut price, touching a low near $105.
But it has since recovered much of that ground in a sharp rebound, and the timing matters. The stock rose about 6% on August 6, when a major lockup expired, and then jumped 15.83% ($18.19) on Friday, August 7 to close at $133.11, according to data from TradingView. It added a further 2.67% in Monday pre-market trading, quoted at $136.67, back near its $135 IPO price. Its 52-week range spans about $104.83 to $225.64. The critical point is that retail turned net sellers on the same day the shares surged nearly 16%, meaning the selling came into a powerful rally, not a decline, which reinforces the read that Friday’s activity was profit-taking into strength rather than a loss of faith.
Why Retail Held On: The AI Story
Vanda offered a notable explanation for retail’s earlier loyalty: many individual investors appear to view SpaceX less as a rocket company and more as an artificial-intelligence play. The firm said retail continues to see SPCX as “a transformational AI story,” a framing tied to SpaceX’s xAI business and the nearly $16 billion in quarterly spending on AI and data centers it disclosed at earnings. Where some investors saw that spending as a drag on profitability, many retail buyers treated it as a down payment on future growth, which helps explain why they bought even as the stock fell.
The Crypto Connection: Tokenized Shares & BTC Treasury
The reason this equity story lands on a crypto desk is that SpaceX now sits at an intersection of traditional and on-chain markets. Tokenized versions of SpaceX stock — products such as SPCXB and xStocks’ SPCXx — trade on blockchains and are designed to track the underlying share price, making them a flagship of the “real-world asset” (RWA) tokenization trend. The Crypto Times has covered those tokenized SpaceX products, whose fortunes rise and fall with the stock they mirror. A cooling in retail enthusiasm for SPCX is therefore relevant to holders of its tokenized counterparts.
Separately, SpaceX disclosed in its first quarterly report as a public company that it holds 18,712 BTC, a bitcoin treasury valued at about $1.1 billion at quarter-end, making it one of the larger corporate holders of the asset. That gives the company a second, direct line of exposure to crypto, independent of how its shares trade.
The Lockup Overhang
One structural factor looms over the stock’s next phase. On August 6, more than 900 million SpaceX shares held by employees and pre-IPO investors were unlocked, more than doubling the number of shares available to trade. A lockup expiry does not force anyone to sell, it simply removes the restriction that prevented insiders from doing so, but it substantially increases potential supply, and it arrives just as retail demand shows its first signs of fatigue. How that added float is absorbed will be a key test in the weeks ahead.
What to Watch
A single $4.5 million day of net retail selling is modest in isolation, and analysts read it as profit-taking into a rebound rather than a rush for the exits. But it marks the end of an unusually loyal streak and comes alongside a newly enlarged share float and a stock that has round-tripped to near its IPO price.
For crypto markets, the signal to watch is less the dollar figure than the direction: SpaceX’s tokenized shares and its status as an RWA bellwether ride on the same underlying sentiment. Analyst price targets on the stock span an exceptionally wide range, underscoring how uncertain its valuation remains, and nothing here is a prediction of where it, or its tokenized counterparts, go next.
Also Read: SpaceX Tokenized bStock SPCXB Price Jumps 7% to $116 in Volume-Driven Rally
