SpaceX Stock Surged 30% After Its IPO. Here's Where It's Going Next, According to 2 Wall Street Analysts

SpaceX debuted at $150 per share and was trading around $190, roughly 30% above the IPO price, but analyst views are sharply divided. Oppenheimer’s Timothy Horan has a $190 price target and sees a $10 trillion AI-driven TAM by 2035, while Morningstar’s Nicolas Owens values the stock at just $63 per share, about 70% below the current market cap. The article is broadly cautionary, emphasizing valuation risk, governance concerns tied to Elon Musk, and the possibility that the easy gains have already been made.

Analysis

The market is currently pricing SpaceX like a compressed option on multiple future businesses at once, but the first-order signal here is not upside—it’s dispersion. That matters because once a high-multiple IPO becomes a narrative battleground, the stock typically trades on estimate revisions and milestone cadence rather than fundamental progress, creating a setup where realized volatility stays elevated even if the price goes nowhere. In that regime, the “winners” are the picks-and-shovels names with clearer monetization from the AI infrastructure spend, while the losers are holders paying today for decade-out execution risk.

The second-order read-through is to the AI supply chain. If SpaceX is attempting to stitch together compute, orbit, and communications, the near-term beneficiaries are not the speculative end-application names but the incumbents providing GPU silicon, networking, and cloud distribution capacity; that supports constructive positioning in NVDA and GOOGL on any post-IPO digestion. The governance overhang also raises the discount rate on the stock: anything tied to a single founder with aggressive timelines tends to see valuation compression the moment the market shifts from story to accountability.

The main catalyst path is binary and long-dated: launch cadence, orbital infrastructure proofs, and whether AI-related revenue becomes auditable over the next 2-4 quarters. If those milestones slip, the stock can easily re-rate toward a much lower multiple even without a business miss because the market will have to deprice the “certainty” embedded in the current valuation. Conversely, a few clean execution prints could keep momentum alive, but that is a trader’s tape, not an investor’s margin of safety.

Consensus is missing how little capital preservation is embedded in the current setup. The asymmetric mistake here is not missing 20% upside; it is underestimating the probability of a 30-50% drawdown once early enthusiasm fades and the stock has to justify itself against public-market comparables. In other words, this is more attractive as a volatility event than as a long-only core position.

Key Decisions for Investors

• Avoid initiating a long-only position in SPCX at current levels; wait for either a post-lockup style consolidation or a 20-30% retracement before considering entry, because the near-term risk/reward is dominated by multiple compression rather than fundamentals.
• Use any weakness in NVDA as a tactical long relative to SPCX sentiment spillover; if SpaceX-related AI capex narratives expand, NVDA captures nearer-term monetization with materially lower execution risk over the next 3-6 months.
• Add GOOGL on pullbacks as a cleaner way to express the orbital/AI infrastructure theme; it benefits if enterprise AI spend broadens, but without the single-name governance and launch-risk overhang embedded in SPCX.
• For event-driven accounts, consider a volatility strategy on SPCX rather than directional exposure: buy downside protection or use collars into milestone dates over the next 1-2 quarters, since realized volatility is likely to exceed implied once the market demands proof.
• Pair trade idea: long NVDA / short SPCX on any exuberant rerating above current levels; this isolates the AI infrastructure winner while fading the market’s willingness to capitalize distant optionality at venture-style multiples.