SpaceX's 100th Launch of the Year Can't Settle the Debate Over Its Stock Price
Published on 08/23/2026 at 08:41 | Redaktion boerse-global.de
The gap between what SpaceX accomplishes in the sky and how Wall Street values it on paper has rarely looked wider. On the same weekend the company logged its 100th orbital mission of 2026, DZ Bank issued a rare sell rating with a $100 price target, underscoring just how fractured analyst opinion has become on the rocket builder's equity.
A Valuation Chasm Splits the Sell Side
DZ Bank analyst Markus Leistner pegs fair value at $100, a level that would mark a meaningful decline from the stock's August 20 close of $134. The call landed as the second lock-up tranche expired that same day, releasing 319 million shares for trading, with another lock-up expiry already looming in December. Year to date, the shares sit roughly 17 percent lower.
The bearish view isn't unanimous by any stretch. Bernstein maintains an outperform rating with a $248 price target—more than double DZ Bank's mark. That $148 spread between the two targets captures the uncertainty surrounding a company whose second-quarter capital expenditures reached $18.37 billion, including $15.83 billion earmarked for AI infrastructure, against a net loss of $541 million.
In German trading Friday, the stock closed at €117.20, up 2.1 percent on the day. The shares have recovered 16 percent over the past month but remain 40 percent below their 52-week high of $194.46 set in June. Annualized volatility sits at an eye-watering 91 percent, a figure that suggests the market hasn't reached a verdict on valuation.
Launch Cadence Hits New Highs
Operationally, the company keeps raising its own bar. Saturday's Falcon 9 launch from Vandenberg Space Force Base carried 27 Starlink satellites into orbit, marking the 100th Falcon mission of the year. The booster, designated B1100, completed its ninth flight and landed for the 220th time on the droneship "Of Course I Still Love You."
Should investors sell immediately? Or is it worth buying SpaceX?
For context, SpaceX managed 165 Falcon launches across all of 2025. The Starlink constellation now exceeds 11,000 satellites, and Elon Musk has said he's targeting more than 30 launches per day. Thursday's Starlink 10-39 mission from Cape Canaveral added another 29 satellites, following a previous launch attempt that had been scrubbed. Mid-August also saw two Falcon 9 missions—for Globalstar and the US Space Force—lift off just 38.5 minutes apart.
Starship Timelines and a Share Price Reaction
The stock's recent wobble traces partly to Musk's own commentary. His remark that the next booster "catch" attempt remains months away weighed on the shares, according to Reuters and the Wall Street Journal, even as the company prepares another Starship test flight. The next orbital Starship attempt is targeted no earlier than August 28, with Musk suggesting the tower-catch maneuver could succeed within months and another test flight arriving in late 2026 or early 2027.
The stock's weekly performance reflects that uncertainty: down 3.1 percent over five sessions despite Friday's bounce, and trading 5.4 percent below its 50-day average of €123.95. Earlier this month, the shares had briefly climbed back above the IPO price of $135 for the first time in weeks, but the momentum has since stalled.
Big Money Is Rotating In
Institutional positioning tells a complementary story. D.E. Shaw built a new position worth $912.4 million in the second quarter while trimming its Broadcom stake—a sign of how capital is rotating toward AI infrastructure plays. Tiger Global Management acquired 375,000 shares, valued at roughly $64.1 million as of June 30. Alphabet, an early backer, now values its SpaceX stake at approximately $94 billion, up from an initial $900 million investment in 2015. Musk himself held a 48.4 percent stake as of June 30, per regulatory filings.
The company's strategic moves extend beyond rocketry. Its $60 billion all-stock acquisition of AI firm Cursor is expected to account for 99 percent of enterprise value within five years, per company planning. Bloomberg reports SpaceX is also assembling a natural gas trading team to secure fuel and energy for its expanding data center and AI infrastructure footprint. A rumored bid for rival Cognition was denied by that company's CEO, Scott Wu.
Regulatory noise has touched the periphery: the SEC settled fraud allegations against Adit Ventures Management and others over pre-IPO investments in SpaceX and other companies—a matter involving third parties, not SpaceX's operations. Washington is meanwhile providing tailwinds, with a new national security memorandum aiming to enable more than 1,000 rocket launches per year by 2030, alongside goals of a lunar landing by 2028 and a moon base by 2030.
With a market capitalization near €1.58 trillion and a stock that swings violently on each Starship development, the next major catalyst is the test flight slated for mid-September. Until then, the only certainty is that the launch record and the share price are moving in different directions.
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