SpaceX stock has had a rough few weeks. Shares are trading 50% below all-time highs shortly after the company’s record-breaking initial public offering in June.Yet one Wall Street firm is not backing down. In fact, it is doubling down with a price target that would make SpaceX one of the most valuable companies ever to trade on a public market.The gap between where the stock sits today and where this analyst thinks it is headed says a lot about how Wall Street is pricing the space and artificial intelligence boom right now.Raymond James stands firm on SpaceX stockRaymond James reiterated a “strong buy” rating and an $800 price target on SpaceX on July 27.At the time of writing, SpaceX stock is trading around $113, below its all-time high of $225.64. The investment firm’s confidence is tied to Starship’s 13th test flight. Analysts called it an incremental step that reduces engineering risk, pointing to a successful heatshield test, a clean deployment of operational Starlink V3 satellites, and a working in-space engine relight. The ship also survived splashdown and kept sending back data, even though the Super Heavy booster again missed a clean landing burn.
Source: Investing.com
SpaceX Chief Financial Officer Bret Johnsen has framed this kind of engineering progress as central to the company’s entire business model. Rocket reuse, he said, has been the real unlock for the company.”It’s really driven down the cost of launch and given us the ability to drive up launch cadence,” Johnsen stated in the prospectus document.More SpaceX:Elon Musk’s startling claim to SpaceX investorsCiti sends powerful sign to SpaceX investorsBeaten-down stock lets you buy SpaceX below market priceHe added that Starship is designed to push costs down even further, calling it a vehicle “intended to go drive a 10x improvement even from where we were already industry leading with Falcon.”Raymond James believes the next milestone to watch is an attempt to catch Ship with the launch tower, a step that would move Starship closer to full reusability.The math behind that $800 SpaceX stock price targetAn $800 price target sounds bold on its own. However, it values SPCX stock at a market cap of more than $10 trillion, which is 2x larger than Apple and Nvidia, which are valued at less than $5 trillion today. Gesuale’s model projects SpaceX will grow sales from $38.5 billion in 2026 to $837 billion in 2031, according to Investing.com. The analyst projects EBITDA to increase from $17.7 billion to $696 billion in this period. Right now, SpaceX stock trades at almost 40x forward sales, which is expensive. The roadshow prospectus also shows that SpaceX has estimated its total addressable market at $28 trillion. Today, the global GDP is less than $120 trillion. Notably, Elon Musk has a long history of providing lofty goals backed by unrealistic timelines. For instance, back in 2019, Musk projected there would be one million Robotaxis on the road by the end of 2020, Big Think noted. The timeline for Tesla’s Cybertruck was also pushed back several times in recent years.Further, xAI, the segment tied to most of SpaceX’s addressable market, is still burning cash, even as Starlink turns a profit, Quartz reported. Every transformative technology of the past three decades has gone through an early bubble, and SpaceX may be no exception.
SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has often failed to deliver on his lofty goals.NurPhoto / Getty Images
SpaceX financial reality check for investorsThe company’s own numbers give investors plenty to weigh. Revenue reached $18.7 billion in 2025, but capital spending that year hit $20.7 billion, The Wall Street Journal reported, meaning the company spent more building out infrastructure than it brought in from customers. That spending led SpaceX to report a GAAP net loss of $4.9 billion for 2025, followed by another $4.3 billion loss in the first quarter of 2026.Growth in SpaceX’s core launch business has also cooled. The space segment grew just 8% year over year in 2025, The Motley Fool confirmed, and segment profit fell as Starship research and development costs climbed. Meanwhile, the AI segment posted a $1.2 billion adjusted loss for the year as the company poured money into GPU clusters and its Colossus 2 data center, according to The Motley Fool.Johnsen has leaned on the company’s total addressable market to justify the spending, pointing to nearly $6 trillion in near-term opportunity across space, connectivity, and AI, and an eventual $28 trillion enterprise AI market. Whether that market materializes on Raymond James’ timeline is the question investors will be wrestling with for years to come.For now, SpaceX stock sits far below Wall Street’s most bullish call, and the distance between today’s price and an $800 target shows just how much still has to go right.Related: HSBC sends troubling SpaceX stock prediction