Bulls Dominate Wall Street’s Analysis of SpaceX

In space, no one can hear your bear case. On Tuesday, the banks behind last month’s gargantuan SpaceX IPO exited the post-listing liminal space ready to tell the world what they really think of Elon Musk’s unwieldy tech conglomerate. Some of them seemed to be channeling Gene Roddenberry.

With lips no longer sealed after the “quiet period,” analysts from Wall Street’s biggest firms became some of the most bullish voices in the SpaceX coverage choir. Analysts from Deutsche Bank, one of the IPO’s many underwriters, boldly went so far as to proclaim SpaceX “the apex of civilizational ambition … bending the arc of history.” Maybe investors weren’t listening: SpaceX tumbled nearly 7% on Tuesday, closing about $11 below its debut price less than a month ago.

Bull Casework

Opinions ranged from “bullish” to “extremely bullish” among the four big banks that led the IPO, which each initiated coverage on Tuesday with the equivalent of a “buy” rating. Goldman Sachs analysts gave the stock a $205 price target, while JPMorgan estimated $225 and Bank of America analysts projected $235. Morgan Stanley came in hot with a  whopping $300 price target, saying its base case projects revenue will rise from $45 billion this year to $319 billion in 2030 and $3.3 trillion in 2040. From Goldman to Morgan Stanley, the difference in enthusiasm amounts to a $1 trillion valuation gap. 

How the banks arrived at their projections varied. JPMorgan called the company’s Launch unit its “key enabler and differentiator”; Morgan Stanley considered the Space unit a small piece of the company’s value proposition. Goldman’s slightly more conservative outlook projects SpaceX will become free cash flow positive in 2031, four years prior to the projections of even more optimistic Morgan Stanley.

Despite the wide range of numbers proffered by the big banks, outliers exist at both ends of the spectrum:

• Analysts at MoffettNathanson have given SpaceX a “neutral” rating and a price target of $131, declaring SpaceX’s claim of a total addressable market of almost $30 trillion to be “absurd.” The firm also noted that “sufficient material inputs will not exist” to meet CEO Elon Musk’s 2029 goal of annually launching 100 gigawatts’ worth of orbital data centers into space.
• Raymond James, which initiated coverage Tuesday, gave a “Strong Buy” rating and a price target of $800 (yes, you read that right). The analysts dubbed SpaceX’s space, Starlink and AI services “the most significant infrastructure convergence since the advent of the Internet.”

Merging Lanes: So what’s next for SpaceX? Probably not the much-rumored acquisition of Tesla, JPMorgan analysts said. While a tie-up would be “strategically coherent on paper,” the bank’s analysts warned that regulatory and governance roadblocks would likely stand in the way. In 2026, massive M&A is simply too pie in the sky, even for the company penciling in a few moonshots.

The post Bulls Dominate Wall Street’s Analysis of SpaceX appeared first on The Daily Upside.