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LivestreamMenuThe big banks on Wall Street began equity research coverage on SpaceX Tuesday, and their bullishness on the rocket company is reaching literary proportions. Analysts for Deutsche Bank said Tuesday that SpaceX represents “the apex of civilizational ambition, oftentimes expressed in steel and fire, bending the arc of history.” Bank of America analysts said the owner of Starlink — low-Earth orbit (LEO) satellites for high-speed broadband internet — is “paving the superhighway to the stars.” Raymond James described SpaceX’s new reusable rocket Starship, which is still in its testing phase, as “the defining industrial innovation of our generation.” Many of the big banks were also underwriters of SpaceX’s June 12 public offering, so their equity research divisions were restricted from releasing reports earlier so as not to boost the stock price artificially. The main bookrunners for the IPO were Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, and JPMorgan, but more than a dozen others played smaller roles. While almost all of the research released Tuesday was positive, MoffettNathanson was virtually alone in seeing SpaceX losing value over the next 12 months. SpaceX closed at $160.42 per share on Monday, about where it ended on its first day of trading after the $135 IPO, with a total market capitalization of $2.1 trillion. SPCX 5D mountain SPCX past five days Raymond James Rating: “Strong Buy 1” Price target: $800 “The premise of our thesis is that Starship successfully industrializes orbital transportation, transforming orbital launch from a bespoke aerospace capability into a transportation network defined by commercial aviation-like operating cadence and continuously declining unit costs.” Deutsche Bank Rating: “Buy” Price target: $255 “Having the capability to launch rockets reliably at high cadence and low cost is core to unlocking the broader space economy. SpaceX has accomplished part of this with Falcon 9, launching to orbit 165 times last year and accounting for > 90% of all upmass globally. Looking forward, Starship is designed to lift 100 tons to orbit (~5x improvement) at just hundreds of $/kg or even less.” Goldman Sachs Rating: “Buy” Price target: $205 “The company is built around the principles of vertical integration, network effects and economies of scale — leveraging its leading position and structural advantages around space launch capabilities into scaling adjacent/complementary businesses. Today, the company operates three distinct (but interrelated) business segments: (1) Space; (2) Connectivity; & (3) Artificial Intelligence (“AI”). In addition to driving cross-segment integration, SpaceX also maintains a vertical integration strategy within each of its business segments.” JPMorgan Rating: “Overweight” Price target: $225 “Launch is the key enabler & differentiator, with ~670 orbital launches, a 99%+ success rate, & 80%+ of all mass to orbit since 2023. Starship should deliver a 10x cost improvement & ~4x higher payload vs. Falcon 9 and enable the company to pursue entirely new markets. Connectivity drives current financials via Starlink, the largest LEO constellation (9,600+ satellites, 12M+ active customers, 164 markets), where we project broadband subscribers growing from 9M in 2025 to 95M+ in 2030. Importantly, AI is expected to be the long-term driver, as SpaceX is modeled to ramp terrestrial compute ~8x to 8GW by the end of 2028 & pursue orbital compute towards ~75GW by the end of 2031.” Cantor Fitzgerald Rating: “Overweight” Price target: $246 “We think investor debate has been anchored to near-term valuation multiples, which misses the central point: a planetary infrastructure company does not compete within existing markets — it defines the cost structure of new ones. Near term, hosted compute at Colossus, Starlink broadband and launch services provide a durable and increasingly profitable earnings base that we believe de-risks the entry point.” Stifel Financial Rating: “Buy” Price target: $190 “AI is the swing variable — compute infrastructure the floor, owned intelligence the upside. The AI infrastructure TAM is the single largest at $2,400B, where SpaceX holds under 2% today. SpaceX is already demonstrating momentum in terrestrial data centers — scaling toward ~1.4 GW of capacity anchored by Anthropic/Google leasing deals. The more significant prize is migrating AI’s buildout into orbit, where SpaceX’s stated goal is to launch 100 gigawatts of compute to space each year.” Wells Fargo Rating: “Overweight” Price target: $230 “The Connectivity segment (Starlink) remains the primary engine of value, contributing 61% of total revenue and reporting $7.2B in EBITDA in 2025. With a subscriber base that doubled Y/Y to 10.3M users, Starlink has established a formidable moat in both consumer and enterprise markets with a first-mover advantage. We see this segment entering the next technology phase, unlocked by the pending commercialization of Starship, upgrading to the Starlink V3 satellites. This upgrade is expected to increase downlink capacity per launch by 20x relative to Falcon 9.” MoffettNathanson Rating: “Neutral” Price target: $131 “SpaceX’s assessment of its total addressable market (TAM), at almost $30 trillion, is absurd. So too are its forecasts for a mobility (device-to-device wireless) segment that is, to us, likely little more than a niche market. Founder and CEO Elon Musk has called for launching compute into orbit at a rate of 100 GW annually by year-end 2029, an amount that exceeds global in-service data center capacity today and for which sufficient material inputs will not exist in three-and-a-half years. There is simply no credible financial model that can support what is at the time of this writing a roughly $2 trillion valuation. Our own certainly does not.”
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