Stock Price Projections and History: The Bullish and Bearish Takes for SpaceX Stock Over the Next 12 Months

Price targets and history don't provide a guarantee on where a stock can trade, but they can help investors think about weighing risks against rewards. For Space Exploration Technologies (NASDAQ: SPCX), or SpaceX, that may be especially useful now as the stock is trading under $125 per share as of this writing.

Over the next 12 months, analyst price targets suggest the SpaceX stock price could climb over 80%, but history may have something different in mind for where SpaceX heads next.

The more bullish case

Based on the ratings of 35 analysts tracked by CNN, the median price target for SpaceX is $225. To offer the full picture, the lowest analyst price target tracked is $131 per share, while the highest is $800 per share. Based on the stock trading at less than $125 per share, a $225 price by next year would represent a return of more than 80%. If it reached $800 per share, that would be a gain of more than 540%, while trading at $131 would be a small gain in the 5% range.

To offer a bit more of an understanding of what that would look like, here's what a $5,000 investment based on purchasing SpaceX shares at $125 per share could roughly be worth in a year, according to the high, median, and low targets:

$800 Price Target (High)	$225 Price Target (Median)	$131 Price Target (Low)
$32,000	$9,000	$5,240

Chart by author

Focusing solely on the median target, a $5,000 investment could be worth $9,000 in 12 months. But according to history, the downside could also be painful.

History's bearish warning

Bloomberg reported that Truist Wealth, an arm of Truist Financial, determined that the average maximum decline in 30 major technology IPOs over the last 15 years as 55% in the first 12 months of trading.

When SpaceX began trading to the public on June 12, it closed at $160.95. From that price, a 55% decline would bring the SpaceX stock down to $72.42.

Going back to the example of buying $5,000 worth of the stock while it's trading at $125, if SpaceX fell to $72.42, that $5,000 investment would be worth roughly $2,897.

Weighing the risks and rewards

On a smaller scale, price targets highlight that upside potential takes time. And to capture truly meaningful gains, it can take years or longer. For SpaceX, the upside lies in launching what could be the future of artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure through space-based data centers. In its S-1 filing, SpaceX listed its total addressable market (TAM) for AI at $26.5 trillion.

SpaceX, however, is also a company that isn't profitable and will need to spend heavily on that AI infrastructure, which it made note of in its S-1 filing:

Many of these technologies, systems, and operational capabilities are novel and untested, and we expect to incur significant capital expenditures over a period of years before our AI products and services and other strategic initiatives, including AI compute infrastructure and in-orbit, lunar, and interplanetary industrialization efforts, become profitable, which may never occur.

If SpaceX executes on capturing as much of that $26.5 trillion TAM as is possible, shareholders can be rewarded. But it's going to be a bumpy road, and as we've already seen, there's likely to be a lot of price swings along the way.

Jack Delaney has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Truist Financial. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.