Citi sends powerful sign to SpaceX investors

SpaceX stock is trading at $145.30, about 8% above its $135 IPO price, according to Yahoo Finance at the time of writing.

Interestingly, SpaceX stock climbed as high as $225.64 after its $135 IPO, according to Yahoo Finance reporting, indicating a peak post-IPO gain of about 67%, before sharply retreating from those highs.

So SpaceX investors were naturally looking for proof that Wall Street's post-IPO optimism wasn't misplaced and that the company was truly onto something special.

Citi's analysts obliged, offering far more than a simple stock call.

Following a 10-hour teach-in on space and AI, the firm argued that SpaceX sits at the center of a 10-plus-year investment cycle, with launch leadership, Starlink, orbital AI, and extreme vertical integration creating a compounding infrastructure story.

Citi just hailed SpaceX as a platform for the future, while the market still has to decide how much of that future is investable today.

Why Citi sees SpaceX as more than a rocket company

Citi kicked things off with a buy rating and a $200 base-case price target for SpaceX stock, implying an expected return of about 34.9% from current levels.

In the note shared with me, Citi valued SpaceX as a vertically integrated platform spanning space access, global connectivity, and AI infrastructure, rather than just a launch provider.

Moreover, Citi derived its target from the average of three methods: 2027 growth-adjusted multiples for trillion-dollar peers, a sum-of-the-parts analysis valuing Space, Connectivity, and AI separately, and 2030 comparable-company multiples for large-cap platform peers.

Put bluntly, as my fellow tech reporter Vuk Zdinjak noted in perhaps the most honest take on SpaceX, that kind of valuation framework shows how tough it is to value such a business.

In the Bank of America note he covered, he panned the bank's use of a nearly 20-year cash-flow model that stretched far beyond the usual 5- to 10-year DCF window and well past the typical 12-month life of a price target.

Analysts looked to assign a present value to businesses that may not be fully proven for years.

Nevertheless, Citi is sold on SpaceX's abilities, especially its reusable launch capability, Starlink's global satellite network, the xAI/Grok integration, and future terrestrial and orbital compute infrastructure.

It also argues that extreme vertical integration will likely push costs down and throughput up at a scale competitors might struggle to match.

Wall Street price targets for SpaceX stock