SpaceX, Four Months In: What the Analysts Now Say
Barclays starts at Overweight with a $254 target. The skeptics point to valuation, control and a thin float.
United States. SpaceX listed on Nasdaq as SPCX on 12 June at $135 a share, a valuation of about $1.77 trillion. The trajectory since has been less than orbital: shares peaked at $211 the week after the debut, then slipped back below the offer price within about a month. On 9 October the stock was up about 4% before the open, at $167.18, after Barclays initiated coverage at Overweight with a $254 target, describing the US as in the “early innings of a modern day industrial revolution.”
## The bull case
Morgan Stanley’s Adam Jonas reiterated Buy with a $300 target, and Dan Ives initiated at Buy with $225 on 6 October, according to Finbold, which cites a TipRanks consensus of 34 analysts at moderate Buy with an average target of $215.72. Ives argues that a rumored $40 billion debt financing for AI data centers would tighten the links between launch, Starlink and AI compute. SpaceX has not confirmed it.
## The risks
- Valuation: Aswath Damodaran estimated about $1.3 trillion and Morningstar about $780 billion, against a market value Finbold put near $2.2 trillion.
- Control and float: Musk holds about 82% of the votes on roughly 42% of the shares, and only about 5% of shares were floated.
- Supply: other pre-IPO holders face staggered 180-day lock-ups, with the full mark reached in December; Musk and insiders are locked for 366 days.
- Contracts: the Anthropic and Google compute agreements carry 90-day termination clauses.
Susquehanna and Erste Group sit at Hold. The IPO scholar Jay Ritter called the tightly clustered underwriter targets “copycat” behavior. The stock has struggled to hold above about $172 since late June.
Sources: TheStreet, Yahoo Finance, Finbold, Wikipedia (SpaceX IPO entry). This is information, not investment advice.
