Barron's called the stock a bet on SpaceX even before the IPO. It's up 308% this year
Expectations of SpaceX's revaluation in the private market or IPO were a key factor in the revision of analyst benchmarks for its large minority shareholder
While the securities of Elon Musk's space company SpaceX are not yet publicly traded, investors have another way to bet on it, Barron's reported. The prospect of an IPO or private-market valuation revision of the world's most valuable aerospace and defense company is causing Wall Street to re-evaluate its minority shareholder, satellite operator EchoStar.
Details
EchoStar quotes have become correlated with the value of SpaceX due to the structure of the September deal to sell frequencies: in exchange for licenses, the satellite operator received a stake in Musk's company worth up to $8.5 billion. Since SpaceX remains non-public, EchoStar securities have become a rare available tool for investors to bet on the growth of Musk's aerospace business, which at the time of the EchoStar deal was valued at $400 billion, according to Barron's.
Now any news about SpaceX revaluation - be it a new round of financing or reports about the forthcoming IPO - automatically makes the market recalculate the fair value of assets on EchoStar's balance sheet. Thus, on December 9, 20 minutes before the close of the main trading session on the Nasdaq exchange, EchoStar quotes jumped almost 10% and ended trading in the plus 6% after Bloomberg's report on SpaceX's preparation for a listing, which could be the largest in history. On December 10, EchoStar shares added another 3% on the Nasdaq premarket.
EchoStar shares are growing faster: over the last three months they have risen by 17%, while SpaceX quotes on the OTC platform Forge Global added 12.5% over the same period. In 2025, EchoStar's stock price rose 308.5%. By comparison, the main U.S. index S&P 500 added only 16.3% over the same period.
What Wall Street thinks of EchoStar.
Barron's calculates that since the September deal with SpaceX, the average analyst target price for EchoStar stock has nearly doubled from $50 to $93.
On Dec. 9, New Street Research analyst David Barden raised his target price on EchoStar shares by a quarter to $125 a share, citing information about SpaceX's value in the over-the-counter market and changes in network deployments that could increase the value of the commercially available frequency spectrum owned by EchoStar.
Wall Street's overall attitude toward EchoStar securities has also improved over the past month, with analysts' consensus changing from advising to hold the stock (Hold rating) to recommending to buy it (Overweight rating), according to FactSet.
This article was AI-translated and verified by a human editor
