SpaceX (NASDAQ: SPCX) jumped about 7.6% on Thursday to trade near $151, its highest level since July, after Oppenheimer raised its price target on the stock and analysts leaned further into the company’s artificial-intelligence story. The move added roughly $10 a share in a single session and extended a run that has lifted the stock about 29% over the past month.
The surge lands six days before SpaceX’s next scheduled share unlock on September 9, an unusual push to multi-month highs just ahead of a known increase in supply. And because of how SpaceX’s ownership is structured, a move this size ripples straight into the world’s largest fortune, most of which cannot be sold.
SPCX ripped from around $140 to above $151 on September 3 after an Oppenheimer target raise. Source: TradingViewWhat Moved the SPCX Stock
The catalyst was a fresh analyst call. Oppenheimer’s Timothy Horan raised his price target on SpaceX to $280 from $250 and kept a Buy rating on September 3, arguing the company is positioned to be a winner in the near-term computing-power shortage through its orbital-compute and AI infrastructure, as reported by TradingKey. It fits a broader re-rating of SpaceX as an AI-infrastructure play rather than only a launch company, a theme Bernstein echoed this week in projecting the company’s AI revenue could nearly quintuple in 2027.
Worth stating plainly: this is a multi-month high, not a record. SPCX traded as high as about $225 earlier in its short public life, and its 52-week range runs from roughly $105 to $226, so Thursday’s move is a recovery toward the upper part of that band rather than a new all-time high. The rally also came on a broadly risk-on session, but the stock-specific trigger was the upgrade.
Into the September 9 Unlock, and Musk’s Locked Wealth
The surge is happening as SpaceX approaches the next step in its staggered post-IPO lockup release. Roughly 319 million restricted shares become eligible to trade on September 9, the third tranche in a schedule that runs into December, which FinanceFeeds detailed in its coverage of the unlock calendar. A stock climbing to new multi-month highs into a known supply event is the opposite of the pre-unlock fade seen around the August tranches, and options traders had already flagged unusual upside positioning in the name in late August.
The move also lands on the single largest holder, who cannot act on it. As FinanceFeeds calculated, every $1 move in SPCX shifts Elon Musk’s net worth by about $5.12 billion, because roughly 82.5% of his fortune sits in SpaceX stock. So Thursday’s roughly $10 gain added on the order of $50 billion to his paper wealth, and none of it is reachable: Musk’s entire stake is under a 366-day lockup with no early-release provisions, frozen until June 12, 2027. He absorbs every move in real time and can monetize none of it. For the fuller valuation picture, the FinanceFeeds SPCX $215 bull versus $90 bear scenario page maps the range.
The Broader Backdrop
Beyond the tape, the SpaceX story is drawing attention on several fronts at once. On the operational side, the company launched NASA’s dark-energy-hunting space telescope in late August and continues its Starship flight campaign. On the strategic side, analysts at Bernstein have flagged that SpaceX may need up to $130 billion to build a standalone mobile network, a scale of capital that underlines both the ambition and the funding demands behind the AI and connectivity buildout, part of the spending story behind its $100 billion second Starbase in Louisiana.
Two cautions sit alongside the optimism. Some early SpaceX investors have been selling into the strength on the secondary market, and CNN this week revisited the key-person risk that Musk concentrates across SpaceX and Tesla, a dependency that cuts both ways for a stock now marking his wealth to market every 15 seconds.
Investor Takeaway
The September 9 unlock is the near-term test: SPCX is entering a known supply event at multi-month highs, an unusual setup, so how the tranche is absorbed will show whether the bid holds.