SPCX
From AI benchwarmer to headline act
SpaceX apparently spent about six months going from “wait, they do AI?” to “oh wow, they’re in the race.” That’s the gist of Oppenheimer’s latest call, where analyst Timothy Horan said the company has become a credible Anthropic rival thanks to its giant Cursor acquisition and a growing pile of compute muscle.
The bull case, in plain English
Horan kept the stock at Outperform and bumped the price target to $280 from $250, implying nearly 99% upside from around $141. His logic is pretty simple: if SpaceX can wrap software like Cursor and Grok into a vertically integrated AI platform, it could keep more of the economics instead of acting like a wholesale infrastructure landlord.
A few things are doing the heavy lifting in this story:
- the $60 billion Cursor deal, which Horan called an “absolute game changer”
- growing AI infrastructure tied to Nvidia GPUs
- SpaceX already leasing compute to Anthropic and Alphabet’s Google
Why this matters for your portfolio
This isn’t just a braggy analyst note. It reframes SpaceX from a space-and-rockets story into a broader AI platform story, which is the kind of narrative that can move valuation multiples faster than a Falcon launch.
If Horan is right, the company’s revenue run rate could hit $100 billion by year-end, with a big chunk tied to AI, and then climb even higher next year. That’s a lot of upside baked into one thesis: more software, more data, more compute, more reasons for Wall Street to squint at the stock and say, “Wait… maybe this is bigger than we thought.”
Big picture: SpaceX is being pitched less like a single-business rocket company and more like an AI heavyweight with hardware on the side. That’s a very different story—and potentially a very different valuation.