SpaceX Stock Edges Higher Today Just Days Before Historic Nasdaq-100 Entry as Musk Denies AI Phone Report

SpaceX shares stabilized Thursday after recovering from a sharp intraday drop Wednesday, with the stock edging higher as investors focused on the company's imminent entry into the Nasdaq-100 index on Monday rather than dwelling on the whipsaw created when founder and chief executive Elon Musk denied a Wall Street Journal report suggesting SpaceX had built a prototype artificial intelligence device using Qualcomm's Snapdragon chips.

Shares of Space Exploration Technologies Corp., trading under the ticker SPCX, were at $159.23 as of 10:39 a.m. EDT, up $1.69, or 1.07%, on the day. The gain follows a wild Wednesday session during which the stock initially surged on the WSJ report that SpaceX was developing a smartphone-like AI device featuring Snapdragon chips before Musk flatly denied the story on his social media platform X, calling it "utterly false" and sending the stock down roughly 7% to close at $157.54. Thursday's tentative recovery reflects investors refocusing on the company's Nasdaq-100 inclusion, now just three business days away.

Nasdaq officially confirmed that SpaceX will be added to the Nasdaq-100 index before the market opens on Monday, July 7, just 25 days after the company completed its initial public offering on June 12. That timeline makes SpaceX one of the fastest companies ever added to the benchmark index following a public market debut, a distinction made possible by a Nasdaq rule change implemented in May that shortened the waiting period for newly listed companies from several months to just 15 days, provided the company ranks among the top 40 Nasdaq-100 constituents by market capitalization. Given SpaceX's market capitalization of approximately $2.25 trillion as of Thursday, it qualified easily.

Analysts at BNP Paribas have estimated that the Nasdaq-100 inclusion alone could generate approximately $4.3 billion in passive buying from index funds and exchange-traded products that are legally required to hold SpaceX shares in proportion to its index weighting once it enters the benchmark. The QQQ fund, the most heavily traded ETF tracking the Nasdaq-100, will be among the vehicles required to purchase SPCX shares, and the forced mechanical buying associated with index inclusion events has historically provided meaningful short-term price support for newly added companies regardless of their immediate fundamental performance.

In a separate development that could add additional forced demand, SpaceX may also eventually enter Russell 1000 and other FTSE Russell benchmark indexes, a separate process from the Nasdaq inclusion that would trigger another round of index-tracking purchases. That potential additional demand has been cited by some analysts as a further tailwind for the stock's post-inclusion trading dynamics.

The Wedbush analyst team, which has been among the most prominently bullish voices on SpaceX since the IPO, maintained an Outperform rating and a $190 price target on the stock this week, framing the company as an AI-driven infrastructure play rather than simply a rocket and satellite company. The firm's analysis emphasized SpaceX's position at the intersection of three major structural technology trends, including satellite connectivity, launch vehicle economics and artificial intelligence, and described the stock as one of the most compelling long-term holdings available to investors seeking exposure to all three simultaneously.

Daiwa Securities initiated coverage of SpaceX Thursday morning with a Neutral rating, adding a relatively cautious voice to the analyst community even as the broader consensus remains skewed toward Buy. According to data from Investing.com, seven of the eight analysts currently covering SpaceX recommend buying the stock, with one recommending selling, and the average 12-month price target sits at $188.17 per share, implying upside of roughly 18% from Thursday's trading levels. The high estimate of $310 and the low of $62 reflect the extraordinary spread of opinion surrounding a company that went public just three weeks ago and whose valuation remains deeply unsettled across the professional investor community.

Much of that valuation debate centers on three distinct business segments that SpaceX has consolidated under a single public entity. The Connectivity segment, built around Starlink's satellite broadband network, is the most immediately visible and financially productive of the three, generating $11.4 billion in revenue and roughly $4.4 billion in operating profit in 2025, with approximately 10.3 million subscribers as of the end of March. The Space segment encompasses the company's rocket launch operations, including Falcon 9, Falcon Heavy and the still-developing Starship system, while the AI segment, formed around the early 2026 acquisition of xAI from Musk himself, brings the Grok large language model, the Colossus gigawatt-scale data center and the social platform X under the SpaceX corporate umbrella.

SpaceX also announced this week that it is offering discounts to Starlink customers in the Memphis, Tennessee, area, according to a Bloomberg report, a move consistent with a broader strategy of using pricing flexibility to accelerate subscriber growth in markets where internet service provider competition is particularly intense. Analysts following the company have pointed to the U.S. consumer and enterprise subscriber market as an underappreciated growth vector given how much of the current Starlink narrative centers on international and rural deployment.

On the litigation front, Musk and OpenAI chief Sam Altman were reported Thursday to be heading toward mediation in their ongoing legal dispute, a development that could eventually clarify a complicated set of legal relationships involving Musk, xAI, SpaceX and OpenAI that have raised governance questions about potential conflicts of interest among the various technology ventures Musk oversees.

The stock's current position, roughly 29% below its all-time intraday high of $225.64 reached on June 16 but still above its IPO price of $135 and meaningfully above its all-time closing low of $147.11 hit on June 23, reflects an ongoing process of price discovery for a company that has attracted both extraordinary enthusiasm and substantial skepticism from market participants attempting to determine what one of the most complex and ambitious technology businesses ever taken public is actually worth at this stage of its development.