From $115 to $800: SpaceX Analysts Are Miles Apart as Musk Pulls Plug on CNBC Interview

SpaceX shares hit record low after Musk cancels CNBC interview; Raymond James predicts $800, CFRA warns $115. Starship Flight 13 test critical for valuation.

The gulf between Wall Street’s most bullish and bearish views on SpaceX has never been wider. Raymond James sees the shares soaring to $800, while CFRA warns they could collapse to $115. That seven-fold gap frames the tension surrounding a stock that, just weeks after its Nasdaq-100 debut, has slumped to a record low, trading at $145.30 as of Tuesday — below the first-day opening price of $150 from the June 12 IPO.

The latest jolt came when Elon Musk canceled a scheduled CNBC interview minutes before it was to air. Moderator Scott Wapner and correspondent Julia Boorstin had planned to question him on Tesla, the SpaceX listing, and the new Grok 4.5 AI model. No explanation was given for the last-minute withdrawal; Boorstin learned of it live on air as the stock simultaneously fell nearly 3% to breach its opening price. The incident underscores how closely markets are parsing Musk’s every move, especially after the stock had already shed value following its inclusion in the Nasdaq-100 earlier in July.

The backdrop is a company in the final countdown to its most complex Starship test yet. Flight 13 is scheduled no earlier than July 16 at 17:45 local time (22:45 UTC) from Starbase, Texas, with a 90-minute window. For the first time, SpaceX intends to deliver operational payload: 20 Starlink V3 satellites, six of which are fitted with cameras to monitor the heatshield during re-entry. Booster 20 will attempt a Gulf of Mexico landing, while Ship 40 — making its debut — will relight its Raptor engine in space before a controlled splashdown in the Indian Ocean. The mission comes seven weeks after Flight 12 ended with the booster veering 90 degrees off course, five engines failing to reignite, and one Raptor vacuum engine on the Ship cutting out. SpaceX says it has since overhauled the ignition system. Highways and local beaches will be closed as a safety precaution.

The test’s success or failure carries outsize weight because SpaceX’s valuation narrative is increasingly tied to Starship’s economics. CFO-level projections suggest each Starship launch has 20 times the capacity of a Falcon 9 mission, and some brokers model 1,500 to 5,000 Starship launches annually by 2031. That kind of scale underpins Raymond James’s $800 target and its forecast that revenue will leap from $38.5 billion this year to $837 billion by 2031, with EBITDA rising from $17.7 billion to $696 billion. Others are far more skeptical. JPMorgan rates the stock Overweight with a $225 target, Morgan Stanley sees $300, and Goldman Sachs has a Buy at $205. At the opposite pole, CFRA rates it Sell at $115, citing a net loss of $4.94 billion in 2025 on $18.67 billion in revenue, alongside an operating loss of $2.6 billion.

Veteran investor Jeremy Grantham has weighed in on the debate, calling the IPO “the craziest in human history” and arguing that 90% of the $1.7 trillion valuation rests on what he terms a “third-rate” AI offering. He also accused the Nasdaq of “cheating” by fast-tracking SpaceX into its benchmark index. Yet even Grantham concedes that mechanical index inflows could buoy the stock short-term: JPMorgan estimates $4.3 billion in forced buying from funds tracking the Nasdaq-100.

Additional pressure is building from lock-up expirations. The IPO priced at $135 per share and raised approximately $75 billion, but only a fraction of the capital is currently tradable – roughly 4.1% of shares. After second-quarter earnings are released in early August, a first tranche of around 911.5 million shares, or 6.8% of the capital, could be unlocked, with total lock-up releases potentially reaching 10.2%. Morgan Stanley expects the free float to grow significantly through the second half of 2026. That prospect has investors like George Noble warning that the stock is “built to separate retail investors from their money,” predicting a wave of insider selling.

SpaceX has also been deploying its equity aggressively. In mid-June it agreed to acquire code-editor startup Anysphere—maker of Cursor—for $60 billion in stock, a deal expected to close in the third quarter. Separately, it is leasing its Colossus 1 computing cluster, which houses 220,000 Nvidia GPUs, to Anthropic for roughly $1.25 billion a month through 2029. Musk acknowledged that Anthropic currently leads in AI models, even as SpaceX and Cursor jointly trained Grok 4.5. The AI investments add another layer to the bull-bear debate: are they a value-creating bet on a $30 trillion addressable market, or a costly distraction for a company that has yet to post an annual profit?

With Musk holding 82% of voting rights, governance risks also linger. Analysts note that while his control drives culture and strategy, it creates succession vulnerabilities. The first public quarterly report from SpaceX is still months away, and the initial lock-up expiration after that report will provide a clearer test of how resilient the stock’s valuation truly is. For now, the market is left to weigh the conflicting signals of a breakthrough rocket test, a canceled television appearance, and analyst targets that span nearly $700.