Space Exploration Technologies Corp. (NASDAQ:SPCX) unlocked about 911 million shares previously subject to lock-up restrictions this week, expanding its tradable share count by more than 140% as the newly public company faces intense scrutiny over its valuation and spending plans. The first major unlock came days after SpaceX reported its first quarterly results as a public company.

The IPO was expected to turn more than 4,400 current and former SpaceX employees into millionaires. One former engineer, Andre Lavoie, is now looking to sell more of his stake as the stock’s wild swings complicate his financial plans.

SpaceX’s Volatility Making This Engineer Sell His Stake

In an interview with the BBC on Thursday, Andre Lavoie, who joined SpaceX in 2009 and was with the commercial space flight company till 2015. At the time of hiring, SpaceX offered Lavoie 200,000 shares, which would be worth approximately $23 million.

“Every chance I get going forward, I’ll sell a little bit more,” Lavoie said in the interview. The aerospace engineer said that the stock has been “going up so radically” that it kept getting in the way of his life plans. Lavoie says he plans to use the money to renovate a hotel, the report said.

Notably, the share release covers only about 7% of SpaceX’s approximately 13.09 billion shares outstanding. Following the first batch, SpaceX’s float would nearly be double its current amount.

Gary Black on SpaceX

Insiders like Lavoie are not the only ones worrying about the stock’s volatility. Investor Gary Black of The Future Fund LLC has been bearish on SpaceX and has been criticizing the company’s valuation.

He recently said that he has been “correctly cautious” on SpaceX due to its volatility. The stock, at its all-time high, traded at $225/share, but has since dropped to below its IPO price of $135/share, even after SpaceX’s earnings.

Before the share lock-up expired, the investor had also questioned why retail investors were buying the dip, saying that the commercial space flight company’s float was set to increase. “This makes no sense,” the investor had said. Black maintained that SpaceX was overvalued.

Bullish Bets

SpaceX bulls, on the other hand, have been all in on the stock, with X Prize Foundation’s Peter Diamandis saying he could see a $10 trillion valuation for SpaceX following CEO Elon Musk‘s comments at the earnings call that he expected SpaceX to reach $1 trillion in revenue by 2030.

Gene Munster, another bullish investor, said that SpaceX’s compute contracts with AI companies like Anthropic would not be at risk of being cancelled via the 90-day exit clause.

He also said that he sees SpaceX report $135 billion in annual revenue for Calendar Year 2027 as a bull case, higher than Street estimates of $100 billion, based on SpaceX’s guidance of $8.5 billion in monthly revenue by December 2026.

Elon Musk Touts Terafab

Meanwhile, Musk has said that the new Terafab semiconductor manufacturing facility in Grimes County, Texas, will serve both the Optimus robot and SpaceX’s "AI spacecraft", adding that the facility, which will be built in 10 phases, stands to create 3,000 jobs in the first phase and that SpaceX will utilize it three times more than Tesla.

Terafab will cost up to $119 billion across all phases of the project in Texas and targets 1 terawatt of annual AI compute capacity, which is roughly double the current U.S. semiconductor output.

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