SpaceX shares surge nearly 8% after Morgan Stanley upgrade, Musk regains trillionaire status

SpaceX shares rose almost 8% on Monday, reaching their highest since mid-June, shortly after Elon Musk's company held its record initial public offering. With the rally, Musk is once again a trillionaire.

The jump followed a Sunday note from Morgan Stanley analysts, who called SpaceX "cheap" at today's prices, and highlighted "future AI product releases, Starship progress, and additional neocloud contracts." They recommend buying the stock and have a $300 price target, representing an increase of about 75% from Monday's $171.09 close.

Late last week SpaceX conducted multiple historic flights in a single day, including sending a crewed mission for NASA to the International Space Station, and a separate launch of Google AI chips into orbit.

The Morgan Stanley analysts suggested investors buy SpaceX shares before the company's next planned test flight for its massive Starship rocket, and ahead of its third-quarter earnings report expected in late October.

Starship is SpaceX's next-generation spacecraft, the largest rocket ever built, and is designed to be fully reusable with both its upper stage and booster able to land safely back on Earth. The system is expected to supercharge SpaceX's business, bringing the company's Starlink satellites into orbit, as well as cargo and crews from other companies and agencies.

Should SpaceX attempt a Starship upper stage ship catch in its next test flight, that could be "the biggest positive catalyst since the IPO," the analysts wrote. In prior test flights, the Starship upper stage has made splash downs in the ocean, but hasn't been proven reusable.

SpaceX is also getting a boost from its artificial intelligence business, which it gained through the acquisition of Musk's xAI last year and expanded through the recent acquisition of Cursor. While the company's homegrown Grok model hasn't taken off compared to leading models from OpenAI and Anthropic, SpaceX is generating hefty revenue by renting out capacity to the likes of Google and Anthropic.

Musk has the benefit of close ties to the Trump administration.

On Wednesday, the Pentagon appointed Musk as co-lead of Project Meridian, an initiative that involves identifying weapons, technologies and military capabilities the U.S. may need in future wars. SpaceX makes a large chunk of its revenue from the U.S. government and increasingly from defense contracts, earning over $12.7 billion to date from its work with the Defense Department, according to FedScout.

Musk said over the weekend he will be renaming SpaceX's AI division, known as SpaceXAI, as SpaceXSI, embracing President Donald Trump's new branding.

As his company's stock soared on Monday, Musk was notably absent from a New York City Council hearing, where city officials grilled AI leaders and researchers about how the technology should be regulated. Representatives from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and Meta were in attendance to testify.

Councilmember Shekar Krishnan noted, "AI has taken over our economy, inflated valuations, stealing our public land for data centers, and increasing the net worth of AI CEOs like Elon Musk, who became our first ever trillionaire."

According to Forbes' real-time billionaires list, Musk is currently worth $1.03 trillion, factoring in his holdings in Tesla and SpaceX.

SpaceX went public on June 12, and jumped to a record close of $201.80 on June 16. The shares started trending lower soon thereafter, bottoming in early August. They've since climbed about 58%.

SpaceX didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.