SpaceX promises to be a disruptive force in the tech, aerospace, and telecom industries. It's shaking up Wall Street, too.
Elon Musk's rocket, communications, and AI company is simply too much for one analyst, with its fledgling businesses reaching across many industries. That is creating a problem for who should cover the stock.
Look at the analysts who cover shares. Deutsche Bank analyst Edison Yu primarily covers the auto business, including Tesla. RBC analyst Ken Herbert covers aerospace & defense. Wells Fargo analyst Ken Gawrelski covers tech. Oppenheimer analyst Timothy Horan covers tech and telecom stocks. Morgan Stanley analyst Adam Jonas, once the bank's long-tenured auto analyst, covers embodied AI.
It's tough to be an expert on rockets, satellite communications, AI, and Elon Musk.
The solution, however, doesn't seem complicated. It's collaboration.
"We took a team approach... We had three analysts that worked on this as part of the [research] initiation," said RBC's Herbert. There is no way for an aerospace analyst to be as ready to talk telecom as an analyst who has spent their whole life studying it.
"It's added a layer of complexity to covering the stock," he added. Sometimes, when a client asks a question about SpaceX's space-based broadband business, Starlink, Herbert has to involve someone else at RBC to go over the telecom details. "I don't know if I'll be the lead analyst on this in two years, but for now it makes sense, and that's how we're trying to handle it."
If reusable rockets weren't enough, how SpaceX has expanded across industries is another reason it's unique.
One thing that unifies the five analysts used as an example is they are all positive on the stock, rating shares Buy. Their average price target is roughly $250, valuing SpaceX at about $3.3 trillion.
SpaceX stock closed at $145.30 on Friday, its lowest close since the June IPO. Shares were down 0.9% in premarket trading at $144.04, while S&P 500 and Dow Jones Industrial Average futures were down 0.3% and flat, respectively.
Write to Al Root at allen.root@dowjones.com
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July 13, 2026 07:23 ET (11:23 GMT)
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