Suze Orman Told You to Buy SpaceX at $200, So Who Is Telling You to Sell at $136?
Suze Orman pointed her retirement-age audience at a pre-profit rocket stock and told them to keep buying. Now the stock is down sharply from her recommendation price, bearish ratings sit on the Street, and a full lockup calendar through December…
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On her June 18, 2026 podcast, Suze Orman told listeners that if they wanted exposure to Elon Musk’s newly public rocket company, the cleanest path was to dollar cost average into the stock itself, symbol SPCX, at around $200. That day, SpaceX (NASDAQ:SPCX | SPCX Price Prediction) closed at $185. By the time this article published in late August, the stock had dropped to roughly $136, and an analyst desk flagged a fresh Sell initiation on the name, one of several bearish calls on the Street. Since then the stock has climbed back toward $161, still well below where Orman was recommending it.
If you followed Orman’s advice and put $500 a month into SPCX starting June 18, you are underwater on the early tranches. Orman’s core audience is retirees and near-retirees who trust her voice on capital preservation. A single-stock dollar-cost-average strategy into a pre-profit, capex-heavy IPO is a different animal than what most of that audience signed up for.
Why This Advice Was Structurally Wrong for the Audience
Dollar cost averaging reduces timing risk inside a diversified portfolio. It is a poor tool for reducing valuation risk in a single stock. Orman conflated those two very different problems.
If you committed $500 a month for the three months following that podcast, with SPCX falling from $185 on June 18 toward the mid-$130s in late August, your average cost landed somewhere in the mid-$150s. DCA cushioned the pain but did not eliminate it. The deeper question is whether the business supports the price at any of those levels.
The Q2 report provides the raw material. SpaceX beat on revenue at $7.81 billion versus the roughly $6.93 billion analysts expected, with Starlink connectivity and the AI segment leading the outperformance. The net loss narrowed to $541 million from roughly $1 billion a year earlier, and adjusted EBITDA almost tripled to $3.54 billion. Those are the headline numbers Wall Street cited before the stock moved.
Then investors read the capex line. SpaceX spent $18.37 billion on capital expenditures in a single quarter, with $15.83 billion of that going to AI compute infrastructure, more than twice the $7.81 billion in revenue it generated in the same period. A company burning that much cash to build data centers is a venture bet with a ticker, categorically different from a bond substitute (we profiled seven suppliers riding that same buildout, from power to cooling, in a free AI infrastructure report).
Reddit noticed what Orman did not price in. On August 6, 2026, roughly 911.5 million shares held by employees and early investors became eligible to trade, more than the approximately 638.9 million shares sold in the IPO itself. That unlock more than doubled the tradable float, lifting the freely tradable portion of the company to 11.8% of shares outstanding from 4.9% at listing. Buying near the highs before that supply event is the opposite of what dollar cost averaging protects against.
The supply calendar does not end there. Additional tranches totaling roughly 328.4 million shares were scheduled for October 9 and October 24, a Q3 earnings tranche of up to approximately 1.3 billion shares is pending SpaceX’s next quarterly report, and the full 180-day lockup on the remaining restricted shares expires December 8, 2026. Elon Musk’s own stake carries a separate one-year lockup running to June 2027. Every one of those dates is a potential supply event.
Position Size Changes Everything
The single factor determining whether Orman’s advice was reckless or merely aggressive is what share of your portfolio you actually put in.
Consider two listeners. Listener A hears “dollar cost average” and puts 2% of a $500,000 portfolio into SPCX at $185. The stock falls to $136. The loss is roughly $2,650, or about half a percent of the total account. Annoying, but not life-changing. Listener B puts 25% of the same portfolio in. Same drawdown on paper, but now the account is down more than $33,000, and the retirement math bends in ways that are hard to correct at 65.
Both followed the exact same advice. One is fine. One is not. Orman’s on-air instruction did not specify a cap, and that omission is where the harm lives.
What to Do Now if You Bought the Podcast
- Total your SPCX cost basis and divide it by your investable assets. If the number is above 5%, the position is a concentrated bet, not a DCA sleeve. Decide whether you meant to make a concentrated bet.
- Read the Q2 filing yourself. Revenue growth of 92% year over year is real, but so is a $541 million quarterly net loss against $18.37 billion in capex. Decide whether you are comfortable owning that risk profile.
- Track the analyst view. As of early October 2026, 45 analysts cover SPCX with a consensus Moderate Buy and an average 12-month price target near $220. Six of those 45 carry a Sell rating, and the lowest price target on the Street sits at $75. Know where the bears are anchored relative to your own cost basis.
- Plan for the next unlock dates. The 911.5 million share event from August 6 is behind you, but additional tranches from the Day-135 release, the Q3 earnings tranche, and the full December 8 expiry still lie ahead. Decide in advance what price or fundamental change would cause you to trim.
At least one member of Congress, Rep. Timmons, disclosed a SpaceX purchase on July 18, 2026. Meanwhile, as the stock was trading near its lows, Musk was amplifying social posts rather than addressing the company’s share price. Both are noise around the ticker, a reminder that the loudest voices on a stock rarely have your retirement in mind.
Dollar cost averaging manages timing risk. It does not manage the risk that you picked the wrong stock at the wrong price, and no amount of monthly installments fixes a structurally mispriced entry.
Editor’s note: This article has been updated to reflect that the August 2026 lockup expiration occurred on August 6 (not August 7), to add the full staggered lockup schedule through December 2026 and Musk’s separate June 2027 expiry, and to note that SPCX recovered from its late-August low near $136 to approximately $161 by early October 2026, with the analyst consensus now at Moderate Buy across 45 analysts and an average 12-month price target near $220.
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Jake has been been working in financial media for almost 15 years. He focuses on all things personal finance for 24/7 Wall St. with high hopes to educate and entertain. Most recently, Jake spent 12 years working various roles at The Motley Fool. He started copy editing fool.com content, worked on premium and marketing campaigns, and helped launch The Ascent, a personal finance brand.
His work has been featured on platforms like MSN, Yahoo Finance, USA Today, and more. He's written about credit cards, social security, ETFs, savings accounts, and just about anything else you can imagine when thinking about money. Jake love to cook, play golf, and tell people he's never had a cavity. (It's true!)
