Elon Musk's SpaceX shares have dropped 20 percent from their peak and analysts say the stock is worth far less

SpaceX shares have fallen more than 20 percent from their post-listing peak in less than a week of public trading, and a growing number of credible analysts are making the case that even at current prices, the stock trades at a valuation the underlying business cannot justify.

SpaceX, which listed on the Nasdaq under the ticker SPCX on June 12 after completing the largest initial public offering in history, priced its shares at $135 each, raising $75 billion and immediately valuing the company at $1.75 trillion. The stock surged on its first two days of trading, reaching an intraday high of $225.64 and briefly pushing the company's market capitalisation above $2 trillion. Then the selling started.

By Thursday June 19, SPCX had retreated to the low $170s, a decline of more than 20 percent from its peak and a trajectory that has wiped out most of the gains from the initial post-IPO euphoria. The stock did end its first week of trading still approximately 37 percent above the $135 IPO price, meaning investors who bought at listing remain in profit. But the speed and scale of the pullback has given ammunition to analysts who were already saying the stock was priced beyond any reasonable fundamental basis before it even began trading.

Morningstar made the most pointed public assessment. Before the IPO, the firm's analysts pegged SpaceX's fair value at $63 per share, approximately 53 percent below the offering price. After the stock surged to around $200 in its first three sessions, that gap widened to nearly 70 percent. "The company's valuation requires you to believe in an extraordinary set of outcomes over the next decade, and we think the market is pricing those outcomes with far too much certainty," Morningstar's aerospace and defense analyst said. The firm identified two conditions that could prompt it to revise its estimate upward: meaningful evidence that Starship achieves commercial reliability at scale, and a sustained improvement in the AI segment's path to profitability. Neither condition has yet been met.

CFRA Research's Keith Snyder was equally direct on the day of the IPO, telling CNBC the valuation was "a hard pill to swallow even there" at $135, and assigned the stock an immediate sell rating with a 12-month price target of $115, below the offering price. "The growth levels that would be required within the AI segment and with premium multiples, which simply have to be astronomical, kind of borderline comical, to get to the valuations we're talking about," Snyder said. After the stock surged past $200, he doubled down. "I'm doubling down that this is overvalued at its current price," he said.

The numbers that underpin the skepticism are not subtle. SpaceX reported $18.67 billion in revenue for 2025, up 33 percent from 2024, a rate of growth almost any company would envy. But the same year, it posted a net loss of $4.94 billion, compared to a profit of $791 million in 2024. The reversal was driven by aggressive capital investment in Starship development and the integration of xAI, the artificial intelligence company Musk merged with SpaceX. Seeking Alpha's analysis rated the stock a strong sell, estimating intrinsic value at just $22 per share against the listing price, and noting that the AI segment generated $3.2 billion in 2025 revenue but consumed $6.36 billion in losses. Starlink, the satellite internet business that is the closest thing SpaceX has to a proven profitable revenue stream, generated $4.4 billion in operating profit, but faces questions about average revenue per user declining as subscriber growth matures.

At its peak trading price of $225.64, SpaceX was valued at a price-to-sales ratio of approximately 135 times its 2025 revenues. The Motley Fool's analysis noted that even Tesla, which itself carries a premium valuation relative to traditional automakers, trades at a price-to-sales multiple of only 15. Analyst price targets for SPCX now range from $22 at the most bearish end to $200 at the bullish end, a $178 spread on a single stock that reflects something almost unheard of in modern equity research: total disagreement on what a company is actually worth.

Bulls have their own case. Goldman Sachs and ARK Invest have pointed to Starship's potential to radically reduce the cost of orbital access, Starlink's dominant position in satellite broadband and SpaceX's expanding government contract base as reasons to look past near-term losses toward a fundamentally different revenue profile in the second half of the decade. Musk himself has publicly forecast that SpaceX could reach $1 trillion in annual revenue by 2030, a figure that would require the company to grow its top line more than 50 times from its 2025 base. Morgan Stanley projections put SpaceX revenue at approximately $160 billion by 2028 and $330 billion by 2030, implying enormous growth but still short of Musk's own target.

What is not in dispute is that SpaceX is currently losing billions of dollars a year and trading at a valuation that prices in decades of extraordinary execution. The stock's post-IPO decline suggests that at least some of the investors who rushed in at $200-plus are starting to ask whether the gap between the company's present reality and the future the price implies is one they are willing to hold through.

Snyder of CFRA put it plainly at IPO. His 12-month target of $115 would imply the stock needs to fall another 30 percent from Thursday's close before it reaches a price he considers defensible. Morningstar's $63 fair value estimate would require a drop of more than 60 percent from current levels. Whether the market eventually finds those analysts right, or whether Musk's vision of a multiplanetary, AI-powered, trillion-dollar enterprise vindicates the bulls, is now a question being tested in real time on the Nasdaq every trading day.