SpaceX Shares Hover Near $171 After a $135 IPO as Analysts Split on Whether the Stock Is Still Cheap

SpaceX is no longer a private tender. It listed in June at $135 a share, raising a record $75 billion and valuing the company at about $1.77 trillion, and the stock is trading near $171 — above the offer, well below the June high, and still the subject of a valuation fight rather than a settled buy case.

Shares closed Monday at about $171, up roughly 7.6 percent, the first time they had cleared $170 since the listing. They touched an intraday high of $225.64 in mid-June and then gave back a large part of that gain. Morgan Stanley, in a Sunday note, set a target of $300 and described the shares as "cheap and getting cheaper," arguing the price does not reflect an artificial-intelligence computing business it valued at about $32 a share now and as much as $165 if that unit matures. The bank pointed to third-quarter results due late this month and the next Starship test as the largest catalysts since the IPO. The stock is up more than 17 percent over five sessions since Flight 14 on Sept. 28.

That flight reached orbit for the first time and deployed 26 Starlink satellites before an engine issue cut it short. Crew-13 reached the International Space Station in under eight hours. The company has also been tied to defense awards reported at more than $12.7 billion and to early talks with TSMC on a chip project Musk has called Terafab. He said no agreement has been reached.

The other side of the ledger is the price tag. Aswath Damodaran, the New York University valuation professor, called the fixed $135 IPO "too richly priced" against his own range of $1.25 trillion to $1.35 trillion. Morningstar has put the company nearer $780 billion and described the offering as roughly 55 percent above its estimate of intrinsic value. One compilation of targets runs from $63 to $450, with an average near $232. A market value around $1.8 trillion on 2026 revenue estimates near $45 billion is on the order of 40 times forward sales. Reported figures include a second-quarter revenue line of $7.81 billion, up 92 percent, a net loss of $541 million, adjusted earnings before interest and tax of about $3.5 billion, and capital spending of $18.4 billion — more than twice that quarter's revenue.

Elon Musk kept about 82 percent of the voting control. The offer set aside about 30 percent of the shares sold for retail buyers. A holder is buying a minority stake in a company whose founder can outvote the float. That was true at $135. It is true at $171.

Starlink is the cash engine that existed before the AI pitch. Its growth slowed as it scaled, from about 51 percent in 2024 to about 18 percent in 2025 in one account. Launch remains the business Blue Origin and national programs are trying to contest. Starship is the vehicle the $1.77 trillion case needs if the company is to fly heavier payloads, more often, at a cost Falcon 9 cannot match. Flight 14 showed orbit. It did not show a reusable ship flying again next week.

Whether the stock is "still a good buy" is the spread between those notes. Morgan Stanley's $300 target says $171 is cheap if the AI segment is real. Damodaran's range and Morningstar's $780 billion say the listing was already expensive. The shares are 27 percent above the IPO price and 24 percent below the June high. The next numbers are the late-October quarter and the next Starship flight. Until those land, the buy case and the rich case are the same set of facts read two ways.