Weeks after the largest initial public offering in history, Goldman Sachs initiated coverage of Space Exploration Technologies Corp. (NASDAQ:SPCX) with a Buy rating, planting itself firmly among Wall Street’s biggest bulls on the newly public rocket and AI giant.
Analyst Eric Sheridan and his team set a 12-month price target of $205, implying roughly 28% upside from the July 6 close of $160.42. The target values Elon Musk‘s company at about $2.1 trillion and suggests a 2-to-1 risk-reward profile for investors.
According to the firm, SpaceX is no longer a pure-play rocket company. After merging with Musk’s xAI in February and folding in the X platform, it now runs three segments: space (launch and reusable rockets), connectivity (Starlink broadband and mobile) and AI (compute, Grok and advertising).
Sheridan’s team praised SpaceX as “a unique company with a diversified opportunity set” across all three businesses.
What Is The Bull Case On SPCX?
Goldman’s thesis rests on scale. The bank sees each of the three units addressing markets that could each grow into the trillions, part of a combined $28.5 trillion opportunity SpaceX laid out in its IPO filing.
The numbers behind the target are steep.
Goldman forecasts total revenue climbing from $18.7 billion in 2025 to $474.3 billion in 2030, a 91% compound annual growth rate, with the AI segment scaling from about $15.6 billion this year to $589 billion by 2031.
Consolidated operating margins are seen swinging from negative 13.9% in 2025 to roughly 50% by 2030 as high-margin Starlink and AI revenues take over.
SpaceX Already Dominates its Core Business
The company has delivered more than 80% of all mass sent to orbit worldwide since 2023, and that launch edge feeds everything else, letting it deploy Starlink satellites and, eventually, orbital AI data centers at a cost rivals struggle to match.
On the AI side, it has struck compute hosting deals with Anthropic, Alphabet Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOGL) and Reflection AI at rates Goldman estimates run well above typical cloud pricing.
The bank models about 2 gigawatts of compute online by year-end, scaling to 36 gigawatts by 2030.
“SpaceX presents a track record of building toward solutions which many industry experts had previously viewed to be implausible,” Sheridan said.
Bullish And Then Some
Benzinga Analyst Ratings data shows a consensus Buy rating and an average price target of $237.74, well above Goldman’s $205.
The high sits at $800, courtesy of Raymond James, which initiated at Strong Buy. The low is $115 by CFRA.
Morgan Stanley’s Adam Jonas was the most aggressive of the bulge-bracket banks at $300, with a $600 bull case that would push SpaceX’s revenue to over $3 trillion by 2040.
Deutsche Bank came in at $255, Wells Fargo at $230, with Citigroup and Needham at $200.
Moffett Nathanson, an independent equity research publisher, was the lone skeptic among Tuesday’s wave. The firm initiating at Neutral with a $131 target.
The Bull Case Is Not Cheap
Goldman estimates SpaceX needs about $270 billion of debt between 2026 and 2030 and does not expect positive free cash flow until the fourth quarter of 2030. Jonas sees the cash burn stretching even longer, modeling roughly $300 billion in annual capital spending by 2031 and no positive free cash flow before 2035.
Investor appetite has been hard to ignore. When SpaceX debuted on June 12, it priced at $135, opened at $150 and closed near $161, with trading volume approaching the 580 million shares that changed hands when Facebook went public in May 2012.
The debate now is whether a company still burning billions can grow into a $2 trillion valuation before a looming lockup expiration unleashes a wave of insider selling. Goldman is betting the infrastructure gets built on schedule.
Wall Street, for once, mostly agrees. History says almost nothing about SpaceX has been linear.
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