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So, Rocket Lab. The internet’s favorite space stock. The little rocket that could. I can just picture the Reddit threads and stock-trading Slack channels lighting up. Green rocket emojis flying everywhere. The stock, RKLB, is up over 100% this year, and every time CEO Peter Beck sneezes, another analyst upgrades their price target to something that looks like a phone number.
The latest dose of rocket fuel? A massive 10-launch deal with a Japanese satellite company called Synspective. It’s their biggest single contract ever. The headlines, like Why Is Rocket Lab (RKLB) Stock Soaring Today, write themselves: "Rocket Lab Soars!", "Dominance in Small Launch Secured!" It’s a great story. A plucky New Zealand-American company taking on the final frontier, democratizing space, and making a killing for investors along the way. They even delivered a couple of spacecraft to NASA for a Mars mission, built in a ridiculously fast three-and-a-half years.
It’s all very exciting. The kind of narrative that gets people to throw their money at a ticker symbol without a second thought. The company projects $1.3 billion in revenue by 2028. Wall Street is practically tripping over itself to slap "Buy" ratings on the stock, with guys from Needham and Cantor Fitzgerald setting targets in the mid-$50s. It’s a beautiful, shiny, perfect story.
And I don’t buy a single word of it.
Follow the Money, Not the Hype
Let’s get something straight. I love a good underdog story as much as the next guy. But when the story being told to the public and the story being told by the actions of the people in charge are two completely different things, my alarm bells start ringing. And right now, they're deafening.
While Wall Street analysts are telling you to buy, buy, buy, what are the insiders at Rocket Lab doing? You know, the people who actually know if the engine parts are any good, if the contracts are profitable, or if the whole thing is held together with duct tape and hope? They’re selling. Not just selling a few shares to diversify. They are dumping stock by the truckload.
In the last six months, there have been 58 insider sales and exactly zero insider purchases. Let that sink in. Zero. Peter Beck, the founder, the visionary, the face of the company, has personally sold over $127 million worth of his own company’s stock. The CFO sold $47 million. The COO, the General Counsel... the list goes on. It’s a fire sale at the executive level.
This is just… off. No, "off" doesn’t cover it—this is a five-alarm dumpster fire of a red flag. It’s like the head chef of a hot new restaurant telling everyone how revolutionary the food is, while you see him out back, eating a sandwich he brought from home. You start to wonder what’s really in the stew. If this company is truly on the verge of becoming the next aerospace titan, why are the people with front-row seats cashing in their chips like the casino is on fire?
The filings don't give you a "reason for selling" checkbox, offcourse. It’s always chalked up to "financial planning" or some other bland corporate excuse that means absolutely nothing. But when you see a coordinated, top-down exodus of ownership, you have to ask a simple question: What do they know that we don’t?
The Bottomless Cash Pit
And it’s not just the insider selling. The company is still hemorrhaging cash. We're talking about a negative free cash flow in the hundreds of millions. That shiny new Synspective contract is great for the backlog, but it doesn't magically make the business profitable overnight. To fund their ambitious—and expensive—projects like the bigger Neutron rocket, they just raised nearly $400 million by selling more stock.
See the pattern here? They are selling new shares to the public to raise cash for the company, while the people at the top are selling their own shares to raise cash for themselves. They're diluting your ownership to fund the dream while they quietly exit their own positions. It feels less like building a generational company and more like a well-orchestrated wealth transfer from retail investors to the C-suite.
Maybe I'm just a cynic. Maybe Peter Beck just really, really wants a new yacht. Or ten. And maybe the company will defy the odds, the cash burn will reverse, and the Neutron rocket will change the world. But the market is a game of probabilities, and the signals here are just screamingly bad. The story is that Rocket Lab is going to the moon. The actions of its leaders suggest they're just trying to get to the bank before gravity kicks in.
So, who are you going to believe? The analyst in a midtown office who gets paid to be bullish, or the guy who built the entire company from the ground up and is now selling his stake as fast as he legally can?
Don't Tell Me What to Think, Show Me What You Do
Let's be real. At the end of the day, all the press releases, analyst upgrades, and flashy Mars missions are just noise. They're part of the performance. The only thing that's truly real is where people put their own money. And the people who know Rocket Lab better than anyone on this planet are voting with their wallets, and they're voting "get me out." You can listen to the hype, or you can watch their hands. I know which one I'm watching.
