Hey Snackers,
Single chord changes, especially in experimental music, aren’t often much to get too excited about, but yesterday’s addition of an eighth note in a performance of John Cage’s “ORGAN²/ASLSP (As SLow aS Possible)” is a pretty big deal in the pretty narrow world of avant-garde art projects that span six centuries.
A single small organ in Germany has now played the same Cage composition for 25 years and is, as of yesterday’s new chord, 4% of the way through the piece, meaning that it should wrap up in just 614 years from now. Apparently the full thing still won’t drag as much as the local school orchestra recital you went to that time.
A relatively quiet Wednesday, as the S&P 500 finished slightly lower after a four-day winning streak. Oil prices were flat ahead of a potential deal to reopen the Strait of Hormuz.Â
A huge raft of SpaceX shares are hitting the market today
For anyone who’s followed the high drama of the journey that SpaceX has been on since its record-breaking IPO less than two months ago — and it’s been difficult to avoid, if we’re all honest — you may expect to see a little more turbulence yet.
Today, up to 911.5 million shares held by SpaceX employees and early investors will be made available for sale, as “the most talked-about lockup in the history of IPO lockups,” as one brokerage firm CEO put it, begins to loosen.
To provide a little context, the company’s June IPO put roughly 639 million shares out to the public, meaning that this first tranche of unlocked stock would (if literally everyone sold up) more than double the current market supply.
Obviously there’s been a lot of speculation about what the potential flood of new shares could do to SpaceX’s price, which was down more than 20% going into its first ever earnings report on Tuesday, and further subdued coming out the other side.
Making things a little more tricky to navigate for insiders and investors alike is the structure of the SpaceX lockup release plan, which Bernstein analyst Douglas Harned noted is an “unusually complex scheme” compared to a traditional 180-day expiry date.Â
This first batch of shares won’t even be the biggest unlock this year; a further 1.3 billion (28% of shares subject to the 180-day lockup period) will be released after the company’s next quarterly earnings release. Almost exactly one year on from the company’s IPO, a whopping 6.4 billion shares of Class A common stock (representing Elon Musk’s total shares in the company) will become available.
The Takeaway
SpaceX has already had a bumpy ride on the public market so far, and its staggered lockup scheme might only add to that. Indeed, as Harned pointed out in a note released on Sunday before the company’s earnings this week: “We have found many investors unwilling to buy SpaceX shares… based on fundamentals, given the lockup overhang that will exist at least into December.”
That’s how many students will have to retake the entrance exam for UNAM, the largest university in Mexico, after the institution’s first fully-remote, AI-monitored admissions test resulted in 16% of the 160,000 prospective students scoring over 100 on the 120-question exam. From 2021 to 2025, just 3.5% of applicants managed the same.
What else we’re Snackin’
Uber confirmed that it will plug more than $10 billion into its robotaxi efforts in the coming years, though the stock fell yesterday after its profit outlook for Q3 disappointed investors.Â
US private companies added just 44,000 new jobs in July, down from 95,000 in June and the lowest level since January, while employees who switched jobs saw their pay rise by 7% on average — the highest level since August 2025, per ADP figures.
It’s all part of the game… Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, Silver Lake Partners, and a PE company headed by Jared Kushner completed the $55 billion acquisition of EA, the videogame company behind Madden, The Sims, and Battlefield.Â
Google shook up its AI leadership ranks. The market did not care for that.Â
Snack Fact of the Day
Refuse workers in Italy salvaged a man’s €1 million ($1.15M) winning lottery ticket after a misunderstanding saw him throw it away in a store in Bitonto. The waste operatives spent two days sifting through the contents of a garbage truck and miraculously found the winning slip on Tuesday.Â
Thursday
Oscar Health, Datadog, Constellation Energy, Warner Bros. Discovery, Peloton premarket, Cloudflare, DraftKings, Atlassian, Airbnb, Rigetti Computing after the close.