SpaceX Stock at $145.30: Starship Flight 13, Lock-Up Fears and a Widening Analyst Chasm

SpaceX's Starship Flight 13 aims to deploy Starlink V3 satellites, but shares hover near record lows amid analyst?? and insider sale fears.

SpaceX is racing toward one of its most ambitious Starship tests yet, but the stock’s trajectory tells a different story. Shares of the freshly public company closed at $145.30 on Friday, just a whisker above the all-time low of $145.07 set on July 10 and a full 36% below the June 16 peak of $225.64. The latest slide comes as a fractious analyst community struggles to value a business straddling rocketry, satellite internet and AI infrastructure — and as a very public feud between Elon Musk and Sam Altman adds another layer of uncertainty.

Flight 13, scheduled no earlier than July 16 at 17:45 local time (22:45 UTC) from Starbase, Texas, will be the first to deploy operational payloads: 20 Starlink V3 satellites. Six of those are equipped with cameras to monitor the heat shield during re-entry, with white-painted tiles serving as reference points for potential damage. The mission follows a problematic Flight 12 in late May, during which the booster lost control on return, five engines failed to re-light and a Raptor vacuum engine on the ship shut down. SpaceX has since redesigned the ignition system.

The test window is 90 minutes, with the booster attempting a Gulf of Mexico landing and Ship 40 — making its debut — performing a suborbital hop, re-igniting its Raptor engine in space and executing a controlled splashdown in the Indian Ocean. Highways and beaches near Boca Chica will be closed temporarily.

While the hardware prepares for flight, the stock is wrestling with a trust deficit. The Nasdaq-100 inclusion earlier this month failed to ignite a rally, and investor George Noble publicly warned that the stock is “built to separate retail investors from their money,” predicting a wave of insider sales in the months ahead. That sentiment is reflected in the analyst community, where price targets span an extraordinary range. Raymond James leads the bulls with a “Strong Buy” and an $800 target, envisioning a total addressable market of $30 trillion and arguing Starship cuts launch costs by more than 99%. The bank projects revenue surging from $38.5 billion this year to $837 billion by 2031, with EBITDA climbing from $17.7 billion to $696 billion.

At the other extreme, CFRA rates the stock a “Sell” with a $115 target. JPMorgan sits at $225 (Overweight), Morgan Stanley at $300 (base case, with a bull case of $600 and a bear case of $75), and Goldman Sachs at $205 (Buy). The average 12-month target is $242.22, implying roughly 67% upside — but the spread from $62 to $800 underscores just how split the Street is. Of 26 analysts, one rates it a Sell; the rest are Buys.

The valuation debate is further complicated by the stock’s restricted float. The June IPO raised about $75 billion at an issue price of $135 per share, but only a small fraction of shares trade freely. A first lock-up expiry after Q2 results in early August could free up around 911.5 million shares (roughly 6.8% of capital), with total unlocked shares potentially reaching 10.2% versus the current free float of about 4.1%. Morgan Stanley expects the float to expand significantly through the rest of 2026 as additional lock-ups expire.

On the operational front, SpaceX reported 2025 revenue of $18.67 billion (up 33%), but a net loss of $4.94 billion and an operating loss of $2.6 billion. The company is also doubling down on AI. In mid-June it agreed to acquire code-editor developer Anysphere (Cursor) for $60 billion in stock, with closing expected in the third quarter of 2026. Separately, SpaceX is leasing its Colossus 1 cluster — equipped with 220,000 Nvidia GPUs — to Anthropic for $1.25 billion a month through 2029. Musk acknowledged that Anthropic currently leads on AI models, even as SpaceX’s own Grok 4.5, trained jointly with Cursor, was recently released.

Against that backdrop, the personal clash between Musk and OpenAI’s Sam Altman flared again. It began after Apple filed a lawsuit against OpenAI on Friday alleging theft of trade secrets. Musk responded with “Scam Altman strikes again,” a nickname he has used for over a year, and accused Altman of fraud “on a whole new level.” Altman fired back that Musk is selling investors “short-term space data centers” — a direct jab at Musk’s orbital data-center plan to solve AI’s energy needs — and added that the latest OpenAI model remains the best in the world, with “the most reliable proof” being that Musk is “obsessed with me again.”

The spat follows a legal setback: a federal jury in Oakland dismissed Musk’s lawsuit against Altman and OpenAI on statute-of-limitations grounds. Musk has vowed to appeal. The feud matters for SpaceX investors because it muddles the narrative around the company’s AI ambitions, making it harder to separate the core launch business from speculative bets.

For now, the stock sits near its floor, the upcoming Starship test will test the technical narrative, and the lock-up calendar will test the supply narrative. The only certainty is the analysts are nowhere near agreement.