On Thursday, 912 million shares of SpaceX stock become tradeable for the first time—more than double the current supply—and retail investors who bought the hype at IPO are the ones most likely to get squeezed when the selling starts.

The lockup expiry, a standard post-IPO restriction that prevents insiders and employees from cashing out immediately, lifts at a bruising time for Elon Musk's rocket company. SpaceX went public on June 12 in the world's largest IPO, raising $85.7 billion and briefly pushing the company's valuation past $2 trillion. Seven weeks later, the stock has fallen nearly 50 percent from its high and sits at $108 per share—$27 below the $135 offering price, according to Fortune. The New York Times reports that a growing number of short sellers are already betting on further declines.

Notre Dame law professor Patrick Corrigan, who has studied IPOs, told the Times that lockup expirations on average produce a 1.5 percent drop in stock prices due to increased selling. But averages don't capture the risk when more than 912 million shares hit a market that's already trending south. The Times framed the story as a volatility warning and a "reminder that going public is no easy feat." Fortune, meanwhile, buried the share price decline at the bottom of a story about SpaceX's hiring push—framing the company's future in terms of Mars colonies and asteroid mining rather than the cratering stock.

Here's what the coverage missed: while Wall Street shorts position themselves to profit from the selloff, SpaceX is actually building things. Musk announced on X that the company is "hiring exceptional engineering and skilled trades talent to build and operate the most powerful AI supercomputer clusters on and off Earth." Plumbers, electricians, steelworkers—real jobs for real workers, not consulting gigs. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang noted at Davos that the AI infrastructure buildout will create trade jobs where people can make a "great living" without a PhD in computer science.

Contrast that with legacy defense contractors, who respond to every budget cut by lobbying Congress for bailouts while delivering cost overruns and delayed programs. SpaceX's own S-1 filing identifies future markets including lunar manufacturing, energy production on Mars, and asteroid mining—ambitious, sure, but grounded in actual hardware and launch capability. Musk's compensation is even tied to it: according to the prospectus, 1 billion Class B shares vest only upon the "establishment of a permanent human colony on Mars with at least one million inhabitants" and the "completion of non-Earth-based data centers capable of delivering 100 terawatts of compute per year." Skin in the game, not golden parachutes.

Still, skin in the game doesn't protect the retail investor who bought at $135 and is now underwater. The Times notes that SpaceX's post-lockup performance will serve as a benchmark for other major tech IPOs in the next 12 months, including Anthropic and OpenAI. Translation: if SpaceX bleeds, the AI IPO frenzy cools, and the institutional money that fueled it moves on to the next thing.

The open question is who absorbs the 912 million shares hitting the market. Institutional funds with deep pockets, or working Americans who believed the IPO hype and are now buying the dip? One group can afford to wait. The other can't.