The Street Says $8T. SpaceX Just Hit an All-Time Low.

SpaceX joined the Nasdaq-100 before the opening bell on July 7, 2026. Inclusion in that index is not an opinion. Every fund built to track the Nasdaq-100, including the giant Invesco QQQ, is mechanically required to go buy the new member, no matter what its managers think of the price. Estimates put the forced buying at up to $4.3 billion from Nasdaq-100 funds, with roughly $3 billion more coming from a parallel reweighting of the Russell indexes.

The next morning, SPCX traded as low as $145.20, a fresh all-time low, below the previous floor of $147.11 it had set on June 23, and closed the day at $148.30. A wave of forced buying is supposed to push a stock up. This one made a record low the day after.

That is strange enough. Here is the stranger part. The same week the index was compelled to buy SpaceX, Morgan Stanley started coverage with a base price target of $300 and a bull case of $600, a figure the bank said would value the company near $8 trillion. Morningstar’s latest research pegs the stock’s fair value at $62. Two respected firms, the same company, the same filing, the same rockets, and a disagreement of almost ten to one.

That gap is the story, and it is not really about rockets. The sell-off says less about what SpaceX does than about how its stock was built: a company almost nobody can price, floated with a sliver of its shares, then dropped into the index that sits inside millions of retirement accounts.

Nobody Can Agree What It’s Worth

Look at what the professionals think it is worth.

Those targets translate straight into company value. SpaceX has roughly 13.08 billion shares outstanding, so every $100 of share price is about $1.3 trillion. Morgan Stanley’s $300 base case works out to about $3.9 trillion, the “$4 trillion SpaceX” headline making the rounds. Its $600 bull case lands near $8 trillion, more than Apple. Morningstar’s $62 implies a company worth about $800 billion, less than half of where the stock trades.

Morningstar is not hedging. It calls SpaceX one of the most expensive stocks in its entire coverage universe, trading at a 152% premium to fair value. Morgan Stanley’s Adam Jonas is not hedging either: his bull case assumes “faster execution across Starship, orbital compute, and Terafab, with AI more than 60% of valuation.”

Read that line again. In the most optimistic case on Wall Street, more than sixty cents of every dollar of SpaceX’s value is not rockets and not Starlink. It is an artificial intelligence business that does not exist yet at the scale being priced. The entire ten-to-one disagreement collapses into a single question: do you price the AI dream in full, or wait to see if it pays? Morgan Stanley prices it in. Morningstar refuses to. Neither can prove the other wrong, because the thing in dispute has not happened.

Why the Index Had to Buy It

For years, a company this large would have waited months to enter a major index. Nasdaq changed that. It adopted a fast-track rule for mega-IPOs that lets a giant new listing join the Nasdaq-100 on its 15th trading day, and SpaceX was the first test case. The exchange announced the addition on June 26 and made it effective before the open on July 7.

On paper, that is pure demand. Billions of dollars of passive money that had no SpaceX exposure suddenly had to own some. So why did the stock fall?

Because the forced buyers were the last ones in. SPCX went public on June 12 at a $135 offer price, opened its first trade at $150, and ran to an intraday high of $225.64 on June 16. That spike happened before inclusion, while traders positioned for the index event everyone knew was coming. By the time the passive bid actually arrived on July 7, the price had already round-tripped: SPCX closed that day at $149.47, right back where it had started trading a month before. The index funds bought at the top of a move that faster money had front-run for weeks, and then sold into.

This is a familiar pattern in index investing: buy the rumor, sell the news. The Nasdaq-100 addition was telegraphed for weeks, and being telegraphed is what turns a supposed catalyst into an exit.

The 4% Float and the Coming Flood

Now the part that makes SpaceX combustible in both directions.

Of those 13.08 billion shares, SpaceX sold only 555,555,555 in the IPO. That is a public float of about 4.2%. Even adding the underwriters’ option for 83.3 million more shares, barely 5% of the company actually trades. The other 95% is locked up, and Elon Musk controls 82.4% of the voting power.

That thin float is why this stock could jump by half in four days and surrender it all in three weeks. When only a sliver of shares changes hands, a modest amount of buying or selling moves the price violently. It is also why the forced index purchase, enormous in absolute terms, could not hold the line: the same thinness that amplified June’s pop amplifies every wobble since.

And the lock is about to loosen. The insider release schedule is unusually staggered. Roughly 20% of locked shares free up after the company reports second-quarter results in late July, followed by tranches of about 7% each through August, September, and October, a larger batch at third-quarter earnings, and the standard 180-day cohort clearing in December. A price trigger releases about another 10% if the stock trades 30% above the $135 IPO price, or $175.50. Musk’s own 6.4 billion shares stay locked until June 2027.

The math is unforgiving. The forced index buying was a one-time event that is now over. The insider supply is a rising tide that starts in weeks and runs through year end. As one description of the schedule put it, instead of one flood, supply arrives in steps. Every step tests whether real demand exists underneath the mechanical bid that just expired.

There is a rhyme here worth one sentence. When Tesla joined the S&P 500 in December 2020, it was the largest addition in the index’s history, and funds were forced to buy more than $80 billion of stock before the open. Mandatory demand on that scale is a moment, not a foundation, and the price that a forced buyer pays is not the price a willing one will.

What Morgan Stanley Is Actually Betting On

It would be easy to dismiss the $600 bull case as cheerleading from a bank that helped bring the deal. It is more useful to take it seriously, because it is internally coherent. Jonas models SpaceX revenue climbing from about $45 billion this year to $319 billion in 2030 and $3.3 trillion by 2040, with operating margins approaching 59% and launch costs falling toward $500 per kilogram by 2030. If any company can bend those curves, it is the one that already launches more mass to orbit than the rest of Earth combined.

The problem is what that future costs to build, and the prospectus says it plainly. SpaceX’s AI segment lost $6.4 billion at the operating line in 2025 and burned $7.72 billion of capital expenditure in the first quarter of 2026 alone, more than its rocket and satellite businesses combined. The whole company lost $4.94 billion in 2025 and another $4.28 billion in the first quarter of 2026, against an accumulated deficit of $41.3 billion. Morgan Stanley itself concedes the plan needs roughly $84 billion a year of external capital from 2027 through 2034.

This is why two serious desks can land ten to one apart. SpaceX is pouring everything into an AI and orbital-compute buildout that may define the next decade or may be a hole in the ground. That is not a rocket company’s valuation. It is a call option on artificial intelligence with a rocket company attached, and an option on something that has not happened yet is exactly the kind of thing one careful analyst can pencil in at $62 and another at $600. The business underneath is doing fine: Starlink served about 10.3 million subscribers as of March 31 and throws off billions in operating profit. The fight was never about Starlink. It is about the AI bet stacked on top of it. For how the rest of Wall Street pays for buildouts like this one, see the coverage of how Wall Street is financing the AI boom and SpaceX’s own IPO filing.

You Already Own Some of It

Tens of millions of people took a position in SpaceX this week without placing a single trade. Anyone who holds a Nasdaq-100 fund, and most retirement savers do somewhere, now carries a sliver of it, bought by the fund at the top of a forced move, in a company that serious analysts value anywhere from $62 to $600 a share. Most of those savers were never asked, and most will never know it happened.

What finally settles the argument will not be another price target. It will be the first insiders who are actually allowed to sell. That clock starts at second-quarter earnings in late July, when roughly a fifth of the locked shares come free, with more released every few weeks into the winter. Until then, the only buyer that truly had to own SpaceX at these prices was the index itself. The real verdict arrives when the people who have been waiting to sell finally can.