SpaceX stock was down slightly early Thursday after a couple of new Wall Street reports that just aren't very bullish.
Shares of Elon Musk's rocket and AI company were off 0.4% in premarket trading at $157.54, while S&P 500 futures were down 0.1% and Dow Jones Industrial Average futures were up 0.1%.
The move came after Daiwa analyst Jonathan Kees launched coverage with a Hold rating and $175 price target, according to FactSet. Barron's hasn't seen a copy of the report. Daiwa didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.
Overall, 13 analysts have launched coverage of SpaceX stock. Seven rate shares Buy. Target prices range from about $165 to $310 a share. None of the major brokers involved in the IPO have done so yet. That's a few weeks away.
A Hold rating isn't a Sell, but it isn't a call to buy either. The more negative report came from Kailash Concepts, which publishes research merging quantitative data with fundamental insights.
Kailash has a value bent, and SpaceX isn't a value stock, trading at roughly 100 times trailing sales, which is a red flag for the firm. Stocks trading at greater than 10 times sales don't have a great record of returns, based on Kailash's tracking. The word they used to describe returns is "catastrophic."
(Over three years, stocks valued at 10 times sales trail the S&P 500 roughly two-thirds of the time and lose more than 30% relative to the index.)
"To state the obvious, 100 times sales is a valuation that is ten times higher than 10 times sales," says Kailash. "Most of that 100 times sales multiple rests on a single forward-looking promise: that, post-xAI merger, SpaceX will put up to one million orbital data center satellites in low Earth orbit and undercut terrestrial hyperscalers within two to three years."
Bulls and bears can likely agree on that point: Orbital AI is the biggest reason SpaceX has a multi-trillion-dollar valuation. Where bulls and bears diverge is on whether AI data centers in space will one day be science fact rather than science fiction.
SpaceX did not immediately respond to Barron's request for comment.
"Making promises is one of Mr. Musk's strengths," added the firm. "Delivering on them is not. His ability to continuously move investor attention from one failure to another 'big idea' is unrivaled."
Kailash points out that many of Tesla's promises about autonomous vehicles have taken far longer to materialize than initially expected. That, of course, is true, but Tesla has more than a million people paying for its Full-Self Driving driver-assistance product and operates a small robo-taxi service in a few cities.
The core of Kailash's call is that investors are overpaying for AI promises, and that AI timelines will surely slip. That might be the case. Of course, in Tesla's case, missed timelines and declining EV sales have really hurt the stock. Elon Musk's EV maker is still valued at almost $2 trillion, based on fully diluted shares outstanding, despite falling EV sales, as investors look toward AI futures, with Tesla robots and robo-taxis populating the landscape.
Still, cautious reflection on valuation is never a bad idea.
Write to Al Root at allen.root@dowjones.com
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July 02, 2026 07:38 ET (11:38 GMT)
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