SpaceX's Post-IPO Crossroads: A $60 Billion AI Bet Splits Wall Street as Lockup Supply Looms

SpaceX's first public report shows 92% revenue growth and $18.37B AI capex, but net loss persists. Analysts diverge on $140 vs $300 price targets.

The numbers coming out of SpaceX's first quarterly report as a public company tell two very different stories, and the market has spent the past week trying to decide which one matters more.

Revenue surged 92 percent to $7.8 billion in the second quarter of 2026, with EBITDA climbing 191 percent to $3.5 billion. Yet the company still posted a net loss of $541 million — a stark improvement from the $4.3 billion loss in the prior quarter, but a reminder that profitability remains elusive even as growth accelerates.

The real shock for investors wasn't the income statement, though. It was the capex line: $18.37 billion in investments during the quarter, more than six times the $2.83 billion spent a year earlier. Of that total, $15.8 billion went toward artificial intelligence infrastructure alone.

That spending spree has ignited a genuine philosophical split among the analysts covering the stock, with the bull and bear cases now separated by more than $160 per share.

Wall Street's Great SpaceX Divide

Daiwa Capital Markets responded to the earnings report by cutting its price target from $175 to $140 and downgrading the stock to Neutral. The firm's concern is straightforward: the capital costs of SpaceX's AI expansion are enormous, and the payoff is far from guaranteed.

Morgan Stanley's Adam Jonas sees it differently. He reaffirmed an Overweight rating with a $300 price target — and floated $600 as possible in a bullish scenario. His thesis centers on a valuation gap: the market currently prices SpaceX's AI business at just $12 per share, while the traditional space operations carry a $127 per-share valuation. Jonas believes the proposed $60 billion all-stock acquisition of software company Cursor is the catalyst that could close that gap.

Cursor's credentials are impressive on paper. More than 60 percent of Fortune 500 companies already use the platform, it counts 50,000 corporate clients, and it reached an annualized revenue run rate above $1 billion as of November 2025. Of the 36 analysts covering SpaceX, 29 rate it Buy or Strong Buy.

Argus added its voice to the bullish camp on August 7, upgrading the stock from Hold to Buy with a $160 price target, arguing that the AI investments could pay off over the long term.

Musk's Promise and the Market's Whiplash

The controversy traces back to comments from CEO Elon Musk at an internal meeting, where he predicted AI revenue would surpass all other business segments combined by September 2026. That timeline struck some as aggressive, given that Starlink remains the dominant revenue driver with roughly 22 million mobile and 12 million fixed subscribers.

SpaceX's infrastructure ambitions are substantial: 1.4 gigawatts of AI capacity is currently online, with plans to reach 10 gigawatts by 2027. The company has secured contracts with Google and Anthropic for data center capacity, plus a $6.3 billion deal with Reflection for compute services. To fund all of this, SpaceX is planning a bond issuance of at least $20 billion.

The market's reaction to all this has been anything but calm. After gaining 9.4 percent in regular trading on earnings day, the stock fell about 7 percent in after-hours trading. In the days that followed, several outlets reported declines of 8 to 12 percent as investors digested the scale of AI-related spending. Bloomberg then documented a two-day rally of roughly 23 percent that added more than $327 billion to the company's market capitalization, and the stock climbed back above its $135 IPO price.

The Lockup Question

With the earnings drama settling, attention has shifted to share supply. More than 900 million shares became freely tradable on August 6 when the lockup period expired — the first major opportunity for insiders to sell since the IPO. A further lockup expiration on August 20 will release another roughly 319 million shares.

Whether that creates sustained selling pressure remains an open question. Technical indicators suggest the stock isn't overheated — the RSI sits at 58 — but the annualized volatility of 92 percent tells its own story about how jittery this market is.

For now, SpaceX trades at approximately $122.86, down 2.9 percent on the day but up about 23 percent on the week. The company holds $100 billion in cash reserves and a $47.5 billion order backlog, providing a cushion while the AI bet plays out. The fundamental question for investors hasn't changed: whether the most ambitious capital spending program in the company's history will eventually translate into the kind of returns that justify either the $140 bear case or the $300 bull case — or something in between.