SpaceX Stock: Wall Street's $600 Bull Case Rests on a Code Editor, Not Rockets
Published on 08/12/2026 at 15:41 | Redaktion boerse-global.de
The most striking thing about SpaceX's current stock-market narrative isn't the launch schedule or the satellite constellation — it's that Morgan Stanley's most aggressive price target has almost nothing to do with space at all. The bank's bull-case scenario of $600 per share, which would imply a valuation of $8 trillion, is built on the pending $60 billion all-stock acquisition of Anysphere, the startup behind the AI coding platform Cursor.
Adam Jonas and his team maintain a base-case target of $300 with an "Overweight" rating, but the logic is decidedly terrestrial. Morgan Stanley projects Cursor will contribute an additional $2.5 billion in revenue this year, scaling to $13 billion by 2027. The platform's annualized recurring revenue is expected to hit $8 billion by year-end and $33 billion by 2030 — figures that exclude any synergies with SpaceX's existing operations. The bank notes that more than 60% of Fortune 500 companies already use the software tool.
The deal is slated to close in the third quarter of 2026. For the bull case to fully materialize, Morgan Stanley also assumes Starship will halve the cost of orbital AI data centers, and that Starlink will serve hundreds of millions of AI robots by 2040 at an average revenue of $35 per user.
Musk's AI Timeline Is Aggressive — Even by His Standards
CEO Elon Musk has made no secret of where he sees the value accruing. In a Tuesday message to employees, he said AI revenue would surpass all other SpaceX business lines combined as soon as September, with the gap widening significantly in the fourth quarter. His longer-term ambition: AI accounting for 99% of the company's worth within four to five years.
The infrastructure build-out is already underway. Compute capacity has grown from 0.4 to 1.4 gigawatts, with a target of 2 gigawatts by year-end and 10 gigawatts by the end of 2027. Musk believes that level of capacity could generate annual revenue between $300 billion and $500 billion. CFO Bret Johnsen puts the payback period for new data centers at roughly one year and has set a company target of $100 billion in annualized recurring revenue by year-end — a figure Deutsche Bank calls "very achievable."
Should investors sell immediately? Or is it worth buying SpaceX?
SpaceX's second-quarter results lend some credibility to the aggressive posture. Revenue surged 92% year over year to $7.81 billion, comfortably beating the $6.93 billion consensus. The per-share loss of $0.09 was far better than the $0.24 analysts had expected. The AI segment alone grew 247% to $2.6 billion, supported by roughly $16 billion in AI infrastructure investment during the quarter.
The company has also deepened its ties to the broader AI ecosystem. Beyond the xAI acquisition and the Colossus cluster in Tennessee, SpaceX has struck an exclusive partnership with Nvidia around its Vera Rubin NVL723 systems and is developing its own Starmind AI1 satellite payloads for orbital AI workloads. Musk has said Starlink will eventually carry more than 90% of global internet traffic, with plans to expand the constellation to 100,000 satellites.
The Skeptics Aren't Hard to Find
For all the enthusiasm, the analyst community remains deeply divided. The average price target across 32 analysts tracked by Morgan Stanley sits at roughly $227, with a range spanning $75 to $800. Morningstar values only SpaceX's traditional business at $40 per share and assigns just a 7% probability to its optimistic "moonshot" scenario of $154.
There are also structural concerns about revenue durability. Contracts with AI customers reportedly carry 90-day cancellation clauses, which could undermine the predictability of future earnings. Argus Research has taken a more measured stance, upgrading the stock to "Buy" with a $160 target.
The shareholder register offers some insight into who's backing the vision. Investor Antonio Gracias holds 503.4 million Class A shares — a 6.5% stake — through his firm Valor. Norway's sovereign wealth fund maintains a smaller position of 0.05%, valued at $1.22 billion.
A Test Launch and a Test of Faith
The near-term catalyst is as much about hardware as it is about AI. Another Starship test flight could come as early as Friday, and the stakes extend beyond engineering. Since the IPO, SpaceX has leaned heavily on narrative and symbolism; a failure could dent investor confidence, while a success would reinforce the AI thesis that now dominates the stock's valuation.
The market's reaction to all this has been characteristically volatile. The stock dipped more than 4% on Tuesday, slipping below the $135 IPO price to trade as low as $131.41. In German trading, the shares have since recovered to €117.60, up 1.82% on the day and roughly 25.8% higher on the week. The secondary listing tells a similar story: a 3.62% drop to €115.50 on Tuesday, but a 23.58% weekly gain. Either way, the stock remains far from its 52-week high of €194.46 — a gap of about 40.6%.
What's unfolding is a genuine test of how the market prices a company in transition. Morgan Stanley sees a path to $600; Morningstar sees a 7% shot at $154. The coming weeks — a Starship launch, the promised September revenue inflection toward AI, and the eventual close of the Cursor deal — will offer some indication of which camp is closer to being right.
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