SpaceX Stock Is Rising And Wall Street Has A Lot Riding On It
NEW YORK, NEW YORK – JUNE 12: Gwynne Shotwell, President of SpaceX, is joined by company leadership as they ring the opening bell at the Nasdaq Marketsite at the launch of the company’s initial public offering (IPO) on June 12, 2026 in New York City. SpaceX is set to begin trading under the ticker SPCX following what is expected to be the largest initial public offering in history. Elon Musk, who also serves as chief executive of Tesla, could become the world’s first trillionaire. In a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the company said it plans to raise $75 billion by selling 555.6 million shares at $135 each. (Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images)
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SpaceX stock is back above its $135 IPO price after one of the more unusual ownership transitions I have seen around a newly public company. Scarcity partly drove the early trade. Then attention shifted almost entirely to the lock-up calendar and the possibility that employees and early investors would flood the market with stock. That selling never arrived in the way many investors expected, and the shares rallied. Now the setup is changing again. More stock is gradually becoming available, while Wall Street is making a stronger case for owning it.
That combination interests me more than another debate about rockets, Starlink or whether Elon Musk can deliver on another ambitious target. SpaceX has already proved it can build extraordinary businesses. The investment question is becoming more about ownership: who wants liquidity, who is prepared to absorb that supply, and what role Wall Street plays in creating the next generation of buyers.
I have written twice about this transition already. Before the first large lock-up expired, my concern was that investors were underestimating how dramatically the tradable shareholder base was about to change. When the shares subsequently rallied around the event, the lesson was not that supply had stopped mattering. Investors had simply confused shareholders who could sell with shareholders who had to sell.
Markets often focus too much on what someone is allowed to do and too little on what their incentives require them to do.
SpaceX Stock Is Becoming An Institutional Story
SpaceX initially traded with scarcity on its side. Investors had waited years for access to one of the most valuable private companies in the world, and only a relatively small percentage of the equity was initially available for public trading.
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Then came the lockups. Early investors and employees began receiving liquidity, and the market became obsessed with how much stock might suddenly appear. The first major release made roughly 912 million additional shares eligible for trading, with further tranches expected over the following months. Barron’s has estimated that around 3 billion additional shares could become tradable by year-end. Now something different is happening. SpaceX is becoming institutionalized.
A newly public company gradually acquires analyst models, published estimates, price targets, deeper liquidity, and a larger institutional shareholder base. Eventually, index eligibility can add another layer. The stock stops being something investors struggle to get access to and becomes another security competing for capital inside professional portfolios.
More importantly, this shift changes who the marginal buyer is. The IPO buyer wanted access, while investors worried about supply dominated the early lock-up trade. The next buyer is increasingly likely to be an institution making a conventional portfolio decision: does SpaceX deserve capital relative to Nvidia, Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet, or hundreds of other alternatives? Wall Street research helps answer that question, or at least gives portfolio managers a framework for answering it.
Wall Street Is Extremely Bullish On SpaceX Stock
After the IPO quiet period ended, a large group of banks published price targets on SpaceX. The median was reported to be around $225, with targets ranging from roughly $190 at the low end to $800 at the extreme high end. Goldman Sachs has been around $205, JPMorgan around $225, and Morgan Stanley around $300.
There are perfectly reasonable arguments behind that enthusiasm. SpaceX has repeatedly taken economics that looked improbable and made them real. Reusable rockets changed launch costs. Starlink created a global communications platform at extraordinary speed. The company is now pushing into AI infrastructure, connectivity, manufacturing, and other areas that could dramatically expand the eventual profit pool.
I would not dismiss any of that because the forecasts happen to be bullish. What interests me is how much investors are paying today for future success.
Some of the most aggressive assumptions stretch far beyond the current launch and Starlink businesses. They depend on SpaceX becoming something much larger, with revenue measured eventually in trillions rather than billions. That may happen. This company has made a habit of embarrassing people who said something could not be done.
But there is an important difference between believing a company can become extraordinary and knowing what price makes that outcome an attractive investment. I have seen that mistake repeatedly over three decades in markets. Investors fall in love with the destination and stop asking how much of the journey has already been incorporated into the stock.
SpaceX Share Price Performance
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Wall Street’s Incentives Deserve Attention Too
There is another part of the setup investors should understand without overstating it. The banks that helped bring SpaceX public earned substantial fees from the offering and are now among the institutions publishing bullish research into the company. That does not mean the analysis should be dismissed. Research analysts operate under rules designed to separate their work from investment banking, and I would not assume a price target exists because a banker told an analyst what to write.
SpaceX is unlikely to be a one-off transaction for Wall Street. A company pursuing ambitions of this magnitude could be an important source of debt issuance, equity financing, advisory work, and capital-markets business for decades. The June IPO alone raised an enormous amount of capital, and SpaceX’s future around Starship, AI infrastructure, launch facilities, and other projects could require considerably more.
A $205, $225, or $300 price target may ultimately prove conservative. I still want to understand the commercial ecosystem surrounding the people making those forecasts. I don’t regard that as cynicism. After more than 30 years in markets, I regard it as part of the job. Investors have mandates. Employees have liquidity needs. Banks have clients. Analysts have models. Index funds have rules. None of those things automatically determines a stock’s value, but together they can greatly affect who owns it and when. SpaceX is moving through all of those ownership changes at an unusual speed.
The Next SpaceX Buyer Matters More Than The Last One
The early SpaceX shareholder had something scarce. Employees and venture investors owned shares in a company that public investors had wanted access to for years. The IPO changed that. Lock-ups changed again. Every tranche of stock that becomes eligible makes SpaceX incrementally less scarce and forces the valuation to rely a little more heavily on what the business can eventually earn. At the same time, bullish analyst coverage expands the pool of potential institutional owners.
A portfolio manager who could not comfortably underwrite SpaceX immediately after the IPO now has revenue estimates, margin assumptions, valuation models and published research that can be taken into an investment committee. Coverage can make a security easier to own even if nothing fundamental about the company changed that morning.
I wrote about this idea in Price Catalysts, available on Amazon. Investors naturally think of catalysts as earnings surprises, acquisitions, activism, or corporate breakups. But a catalyst can also be a change in who is able or willing to own security. Greater liquidity, broader research coverage, or a changing shareholder base can alter demand without changing the underlying business.
We spend a lot of time studying exactly that at The Edge because the headline corporate event is rarely the end of the investment process. An IPO creates one shareholder base. A lock-up changes it. Analyst coverage changes again. Index inclusion, employee liquidity, and future capital raises can alter it further.
The company may be executing exactly as expected while the stock behaves completely differently because the identity of the marginal buyer has changed. SpaceX is perhaps the most extreme current example.
SpaceX Stock Is Getting A Better Test
The first large lock-up taught investors something useful. Hundreds of millions of shares becoming eligible to trade did not mean that hundreds of millions of shares were about to be sold, but it does not mean the supply question has disappeared.
More stock is expected to become eligible over the coming months, and SpaceX will need enormous amounts of capital if even part of its plans around Starship, AI infrastructure, orbital computing, and new launch facilities are realized. Meanwhile, Wall Street is offering institutions increasingly ambitious valuation frameworks that make the case for absorbing some of that supply.
As liquidity improves, scarcity should matter less. The quality of the company, the assumptions embedded in the valuation, and the willingness of institutional investors to commit capital should matter more. That should produce healthier price discovery, but it can also be uncomfortable for investors who bought primarily because getting the shares was difficult.
I would not bet casually against SpaceX. It has repeatedly turned improbable ambitions into functioning businesses and created enormous economic value in the process. But admiration for the company does not remove the need to ask what today’s shareholder must assume.
The early debate around SpaceX was whether investors could get enough shares. Then it became whether existing shareholders would dump them when the lockup expired. The next debate is more important: whether a broader institutional buyer base can absorb steadily increasing supply without requiring ever more extraordinary assumptions about what SpaceX has become ten years from now.
That is why SpaceX stock interests me more now than it did immediately after the IPO. The rockets have not suddenly changed, and neither has the long-term promise of Starlink or the company’s AI ambitions. What is changing is the ownership structure, the incentives of those involved in that transition, and, most importantly, who the next buyer will be.