EspaceX Shares rose nearly 8% on Monday, reaching their highest level since mid-June, shortly after Elon Musk’s company completed its record IPO. With this rally, Musk becomes a billionaire again.
The jump followed a Sunday note from Morgan Stanley analysts, who called SpaceX “cheap” at current prices, and highlighted “future AI product releases, Starship advancements, and additional neocloud contracts.” They recommend buying the stock and have a price target of $300, representing an increase of about 75% from Monday’s close of $171.09.
Late last week, SpaceX completed several historic flights in a single day, including sending a crewed mission for NASA to the International Space Station and a separate launch of Google The AI goes into orbit.
Morgan Stanley analysts have suggested investors buy SpaceX shares ahead of the company’s next planned test flight of its massive Starship rocket, and ahead of the third-quarter earnings report expected in late October.
Starship is SpaceX’s next-generation spacecraft, the largest rocket ever built, and is designed to be fully reusable with its upper stage and booster capable of landing safely on Earth. The system is expected to boost SpaceX’s business, putting the company’s Starlink satellites into orbit, as well as cargo and crews from other companies and agencies.
If SpaceX tried to catch a Starship upper stage on its next test flight, it could be “the biggest positive catalyst since the IPO,” the analysts wrote. In previous test flights, the Starship’s upper stage splashed into the ocean, but was not proven reusable.
SpaceX is also benefiting from the growth of its artificial intelligence business, acquired last year through the acquisition of xAI from Musk and expanded through the recent acquisition of Cursor. Although the company’s Grok model hasn’t taken off compared to OpenAI and Anthropic’s main models, SpaceX generates significant revenue by leasing capacity from companies like Google and Anthropic.
Musk enjoys close ties to the Trump administration.
On Wednesday, the Pentagon named Musk co-leader of Project Meridian, an initiative to identify weapons, technologies and military capabilities the United States may need in future wars. SpaceX derives much of its revenue from the U.S. government and, increasingly, from defense contracts, earning more than $12.7 billion to date from its work with the Department of Defense, according to FedScout.
Musk announced over the weekend that he would rename SpaceX’s AI division, known as SpaceXAI, to SpaceXSI, adopting President Donald Trump’s new branding.
As his company’s shares soared on Monday, Musk was notably absent from a New York City Council hearing, where city officials questioned AI executives and researchers about how the technology should be regulated. Representatives from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and Meta were on hand to testify.
Councilmember Shekar Krishnan noted, “AI has taken over our economy, inflated valuations, stolen our public lands for data centers, and increased the net worth of AI CEOs like Elon Musk, who became our very first billionaire. »
According to Forbes’ Real-Time Billionaires List, Musk is currently worth $1.03 trillion, taking into account his stakes in Tesla and SpaceX.
SpaceX went public on June 12 and surged to a record close of $201.80 on June 16. Stocks began to decline soon after, bottoming out in early August. Since then, they have climbed about 58%.
SpaceX did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
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