Industrials and Manufacturing Sector
Industrial and manufacturing sectors saw divergent pressures today. Capital-intensive plays like SpaceX faced headwinds from a massive share unlock, while autonomous vehicle deployments and battery supply chains advanced. Manufacturing expansion in autos and mining exploration continued despite broader market volatility.
SpaceX shares dropped 2.6% to $142.36 as roughly 319 million restricted shares prepared to enter the public float. The upcoming release represents the second tranche of a staggered lockup schedule following the company's June flotation, releasing a block valued at approximately $45.4 billion based on recent trading. Early employees and investors gain the ability to trade the shares, creating a supply test equal to 3.3 days of average trading volume. The phased expirations will continue to introduce 7% tranches at subsequent intervals, while CEO Elon Musk's 6.42 billion shares remain locked until June 2027. Meanwhile, SpaceX reported second-quarter revenue of $7.814 billion alongside capital expenditures totaling around $15.8 billion, driven largely by heavy spending on artificial intelligence infrastructure.
Google won a bankruptcy auction to acquire internal operational data and software code from defunct carrier Spirit Airlines for $10 million. The winning bid secures roughly 100 million employee emails across 80,000 accounts, 500 million Microsoft Teams messages, 17 million OneDrive files, 20 million SharePoint files, and 516 source code repositories. Google plans to feed this digital back-office archive into its artificial intelligence models and product development pipelines. A third party will strip personally identifiable information from the files before delivery, with Google covering the anonymization costs and bearing the contractual obligation to keep the dataset isolated from specific households. The asset sale bested a $7.5 million competing bid from AI data specialist Mercor. Spirit, which filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in August 2025 and ceased operations in May 2026, excluded passenger profiles and credit card records from the transaction.
Nevada's Transportation Authority unanimously approved permits Thursday allowing Tesla, Uber, and Waymo to operate up to 8,000 robotaxis in Clark County over the next 12 months, according to TechCrunch. Tesla received authorization for 5,000 vehicles, Waymo for 1,000, and Uber for 1,000 (operating through Motional and Zoox partnerships). The permits are ceilings, not forecasts. Tesla's Cybercab chief engineer Eric Early testified the company expects to deploy 2,500 vehicles by next year, not the full 5,000 allowed. Waymo and Tesla are pursuing robotaxi-only networks; Uber is lobbying for a hybrid model mixing human and autonomous drivers, positioning itself as a gradual-integration alternative to market saturation. The Golden Triangle—the airport-to-Las Vegas Boulevard corridor—will be the primary deployment zone, though Motional is also testing downtown and at Town Square shopping district. Local taxi operators and the Livery Operators Association opposed the approvals, citing oversaturation of commercial transportation and road congestion in the Golden Triangle. The permits pit three competing visions of autonomous mobility against each other in a single market, with workforce impact—job creation in vehicle maintenance and charging versus displacement of human drivers—unresolved.