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โ† Value Add PulseIPO$225 median target

Wall Street's $800 SpaceX Target Meets a 42% Crash

Eighteen banks issued SpaceX targets as high as $800, but the stock has fallen ~42% from its post-IPO peak and now trades near its $135 offer price, a gap that looks like herd behavior, not analysis.

$135
IPO price (June)
~$211
Post-IPO peak
~$123-$125
Current price
$225
Median analyst target
$800 / $190
High/low targets
TC
Trace Cohen
Early-stage VC & angel ยท Founder, New York Venture Partners
July 18, 2026
3 min read
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THE RUNDOWN
1

Eighteen banks initiated or updated coverage on SpaceX with price targets ranging from Stifel's $190 to Raymond James's $800, a median of $225 that implies 41% upside from SpaceX's July 6 close of $160, per Fortune's July 18 analysis

2

SpaceX shares have fallen from a post-IPO peak near $211 to roughly $123-$125, a decline of roughly 42% in barely six weeks, and now trade close to their $135 June IPO price rather than the near-$2 trillion valuation Wall Street was pricing a month ago

3

SpaceX lost $4.9 billion on under $19 billion of revenue in 2025, meaning the median $225 analyst target implies pricing the company near 105 times trailing revenue -- a multiple with no direct comparable in the launch or satellite industry

4

Nine of the 18 targets cluster between $200 and $225 and five more sit between $235 and $250, a tightness Fortune argues looks like banks anchoring to each other's numbers rather than independently modeling Starship, Starlink and the company's cash burn

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The VC Read ยท Trace's TakeTrace Cohen

A 105x-revenue median target with nine of eighteen banks clustered within $25 of each other isn't independent research, it's herd behavior with a research-note wrapper, and every fund marking up AI-infra positions off comparable-company multiples should be nervous about what that implies for their own marks. SpaceX's round trip from $211 back to $135 in six weeks is the actual base case for what happens when a hyped AI-adjacent IPO meets a public market that reprices daily instead of quarterly -- founders and GPs eyeing a 2026-2027 listing should plan for that exact whipsaw, not the peak.

Eighteen banks have now published price targets on SpaceX, and the spread tells its own story: Raymond James at $800, Morgan Stanley at $300, J.P. Morgan and Deutsche Bank both at $225, Stifel at the low end at $190. The median comes out to $225, implying 41% upside from the stock's July 6 close of $160, according to a Fortune analysis published July 18. The catch is that SpaceX shares have already fallen roughly 42% from their post-IPO peak of roughly $211 to around $123-$125 today, landing the stock back near its $135 June IPO price just six weeks after it started trading.

SpaceX went public in June at a roughly $400 billion valuation, one of the largest tech listings in history, and immediately traded up on Starship enthusiasm and Starlink's growing subscriber base. The rally lasted three days. Since then, a scrubbed Starship test flight, broader AI-infrastructure jitters and a stock that had simply run too far too fast have combined to erase the gains, even as the same banks that priced the IPO keep publishing bullish coverage.

The language in the research notes is doing a lot of work. Morgan Stanley calls SpaceX "AI's final frontier." Bank of America says the company is "paving the superhighway to the stars." Raymond James compares the potential impact to electrification, railroads and the internet. None of that framing is unique to SpaceX -- it's the same register Wall Street used on Nvidia in 2024 and on OpenAI's private markups this year, and it's increasingly the default posture toward any company sitting at the center of the AI infrastructure buildout.

โ€œAt the median target, SpaceX would trade near 105 times trailing revenue, a multiple with no direct comparable anywhere in launch, satellite or even hyperscale cloud.โ€

What's unusual is the clustering. Nine of the 18 targets sit between $200 and $225, and five more land between $235 and $250 -- a tightness that, absent identical models, suggests banks are anchoring to each other's numbers rather than independently underwriting Starship's launch cadence, Starlink's subscriber economics and a company that lost $4.9 billion on less than $19 billion of revenue last year. At the median target, SpaceX would trade near 105 times trailing revenue, a multiple with no direct comparable anywhere in launch, satellite or even hyperscale cloud.

The comparison worth drawing is to OpenAI, whose confidential S-1 and pending IPO are running into their own turbulence this week via Apple's trade-secrets lawsuit, and to Databricks, which just marked itself at $188 billion privately with no public print to test it against. All three are variations on the same question currently facing every AI-adjacent company approaching or just past a public listing: does the growth story survive contact with a public market that reprices weekly, or was the valuation built entirely on private-round momentum and analyst consensus that never really diverged from each other in the first place.

For VCs and LPs, SpaceX's post-IPO trajectory is the cleanest real-world test case yet of how public markets treat AI-infrastructure companies once the lockup-free trading starts: not with patience, but with a repricing that's already erased two-thirds of the post-IPO pop in under two months. Portfolio companies eyeing 2026-2027 listings should treat the $211-to-$123 round trip as the base case, not the tail risk.

The bear case for the bear case: SpaceX's underlying businesses -- Starlink subscriber growth, national-security launch contracts, Starship's eventual reusability economics -- haven't actually changed in the six weeks since the stock cratered, and a 42% round trip in a newly public, thinly-floated mega-cap isn't unprecedented (Rivian, Lucid and Coinbase all did similar things). The targets could simply be right about the multi-decade opportunity while being early on timing.

What to watch next: whether the next round of bank notes lowers targets to reflect the actual trading range rather than the post-IPO euphoria, and whether SpaceX's next Starship test -- after this week's scrub -- flies cleanly enough to give the bulls a concrete catalyst instead of a narrative one.

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Originally reported by Fortune. Analysis and editorial commentary by Value Add Pulse.

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@Trace_Cohenยทt@nyvp.com