Musk

The stock was down more than 13 percent as investors were spooked by the company’s heavy investments.

SpaceX share price has plunged more than 13 percent, a day after the Elon Musk-run company reported its first quarterly earnings as a publicly listed company.

On Wednesday, the stock closed down at $108.10, down 13.6 percent from Tuesday’s close of $125.33.

Investors have been spooked by the increase in the company’s capital expenditure. At $18.37bn, it was a six-fold jump from last year, and much higher than the $13.2bn that analysts had forecast.

The majority of that investment, $15.8bn, is earmarked for artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure, which includes specialised compute, storage, networking and software systems required to build, train, deploy and operate AI models at scale. SpaceX has said it wants to increase the capacity of its data centres from 1.4GW currently to 2GW by year-end.

Investors across the technology sector are questioning whether the large investments in AI infrastructure will actually yield returns.

“We’ve watched the same scrutiny land on Big Tech this earnings season, where investors have questioned open-ended wallets and started demanding a visible return on them,” said Josh Gilbert, lead analyst at trading platform eToro.

“SpaceX faces that test with an added degree of difficulty because it’s asking shareholders to bankroll data centres in orbit.”

SpaceX has said its computing capacity not only serves its Grok models but is also actively sold, with $14.1bn in cloud-services agreements lined up.

The one area that SpaceX saw some profit was from the “connectivity” business, with revenue jumping 66 percent from a year earlier as the number of subscribers to its Starlink satellite communications service doubled to 12 million, bringing in $1.66bn in operating income.

SpaceX’s share price faces another test on Thursday, when the first tranche of the post-IPO lock-up expires, making up to 911.5 million shares, roughly 20 percent of restricted holdings, eligible for sale.

Melissa Otto, head of Visible Alpha research at S&P Global, told Al Jazeera that the stock is “likely to be volatile” once the lock-up lifts.

SpaceX’s IPO was priced at $135 per share and climbed to $225 within days of its June 12 debut, briefly catapulting Musk as the world’s first trillionaire. The stock has since dropped.

July 14 (UPI) — The Wisconsin Elections Commission has sent two complaints to prosecutors accusing businessman Elon Musk of violating anti-bribery law when he gave out millions to people to encourage them to vote last year.

The bipartisan commission voted 5-1 to forward the complaints to the Brown County District Attorney, WISN-TV in Milwaukee reported.

Musk’s American PAC wrote $1 million checks to two voters in the 2025 election as part of tens of millions he invested in the failed campaign of conservative Brad Schimel, who sought a seat on the Wisconsin Supreme Court. He lost to Susan Crawford, a liberal, who previously served as a circuit court judge in Dane County.

Musk also gave out other prizes ranging from $20 to $100 for those who signed the “Petition in Opposition to Activist Judges,” Forbes reported.

The commission said Musk’s post on X offering $ 1 million to those who voted in the Wisconsin Supreme Court election to induce them to vote showed probable cause that he violated state election law banning bribery.

Lawsuit claims Tesla’s Autopilot shortcomings led to fatal crash; family seeks $1m in damages and punitive measures.

The family of a Texas woman who was killed has filed a lawsuit against Tesla after a driver using a Model 3’s automated driving assistance system crashed into a suburban Houston home last week.

The complaint, filed on Tuesday, argues that Tesla should be held liable for the wrongful death of 76-year-old Martha Avila. The family alleges that the automaker, led by Elon Musk, failed to adequately warn drivers about alleged defects in its Autopilot and Full Self-Driving systems.

Avila’s daughter, Jennifer Barbour, and her husband, Justin Barbour, said the Model 3’s driver, Michael Butler, told law enforcement he engaged Autopilot before ploughing through the front wall of Avila’s home in Katy, Texas, the United States, on June 19, pinning her before she succumbed to her injuries at a nearby hospital, according to the complaint.

Video obtained by KHOU – Houston’s CBS affiliate — shows the car travelling at top speed over the front lawn of Avila’s home in the Houston suburb before slamming into the front room.

The driver told the Harris County Sheriff’s Office that he was using the technology at the time of the accident. The driver in the incident was not under the influence of alcohol and is cooperating with authorities.

Butler is also a defendant in the Barbours’ lawsuit. It is unclear whether he has a lawyer.

Musk, the world’s richest person, posted on X on Monday night: “FSD drives slowly through neighbourhood streets and this was a high-speed crash!”

Ashok Elluswamy, vice president of AI software at Tesla, posted on X in response, saying that “the driver manually overrode self-driving by pressing the accelerator all the way to 100% of the accel pedal in this residential area.”

The lawsuit filed in a Harris County, Texas, state court seeks more than $1m in damages, and punitive damages reflecting Tesla’s alleged “reckless disregard for a substantial risk of severe bodily injury”.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) has been investigating the crash.

Since 2016, the NHTSA has opened nearly 50 special investigations of Tesla crashes believed to involve advanced driver assistance systems. About two dozen deaths were reported.

In March, the NHTSA escalated its probe into 3.2 million Teslas equipped with Full Self-Driving, on concern the system may fail to detect or warn drivers in poor visibility. In 2023, Tesla recalled about two million vehicles, nearly all of its electric vehicles on US roads, to better ensure that drivers pay attention when using Autopilot.

Tesla has said Autopilot enables vehicles to steer, accelerate and brake within their lanes, while Full Self-Driving lets vehicles obey traffic signals and change lanes.

The carmaker has also said both technologies require “fully attentive” drivers whose hands are on the wheel.

The incident comes as the Musk-owned company is rolling out robotaxis using automated software in several US cities this year and plans to invite Tesla owners across the country to put their cars into the fleet using the same system.

SpaceX lands on public markets as the sixth largest US company by market value.

SpaceX has debuted on US markets with a market valuation of more than $2 trillion, minting CEO Elon Musk as the world’s first trillionaire.

Shares are set to open on Friday at $150 per share, marking a 6.6 percent increase from the initial public offering (IPO) price, valuing the company at $1.96 trillion putting the aerospace company on track to become the sixth-largest company in the United States.

The company sold $75bn in shares, immediately valuing it at $1.77 trillion. The IPO was oversubscribed four times higher than was otherwise expected, according to the Reuters news agency.

Of the institutional investors allocated, according to Bloomberg News, as much as 70 percent went to what are called long-only investments — a strategy in which holders buy assets based on the expectation that their value will grow over time — and sovereign wealth funds, including those from Saudi Arabia and Kuwait as well.

SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell and Chief Financial Officer Bret Johnsen rang the Nasdaq MarketSite in New York City opening bell at 9:30am local time as US markets opened.

On Thursday, protesters gathered outside the MarketSite to protest the IPO amid continued allegations that Grok, part of xAI, a subsidiary of SpaceX, allowed users to create non-consensual deepfake sexualised images before the IPO debut.

Shares of SpaceX did not trade until the middle of the trading day as the exchange collected buy and sell orders and underwriters delayed trading until supply and demand were balanced.

“We would expect SpaceX to see an immediate pop in trading due to the hype around the deal, north of 20 percent perhaps,” said Samuel Kerr, global head of equity capital markets at Mergermarket. “Anything lower would actually make me nervous.”

Exchanges and trading firms are eager to avoid the technical mishaps that marred Meta’s 2012 debut. With SpaceX widely viewed as a dress rehearsal for a new generation of mega-listings, market participants will also be watching for signals on investor appetite in advance of forthcoming IPOs for AI heavyweights Anthropic and OpenAI.

The landmark listing cemented Musk’s status as the first trillionaire ever and propelled SpaceX into the ranks of the world’s most valuable companies — even though the firm posted a loss of nearly $5bn last year and generated only a fraction of the revenue brought in by similarly valued tech giants.

The surge comes amid growth driven by its Starlink subsidiary, which drives as much as 80 percent of its revenue.

On Friday, SpaceX launched its Falcon 9 rocket with 29 satellites into space from Cape Canaveral in Florida.