Investor's Corner
Lucid stock gets elevated target boost from CFRA after initial analysis
Lucid Group (NASDAQ: LCID) is already getting a boost in its price target from CFRA analyst Garrett Nelson, who released his initial opinions on the company’s stock last week.
Last week, CFRA’s Garrett Nelson opened coverage on Lucid Group, making it the first firm to begin coverage on the electric automaker’s stock. After opening coverage with a $25 price target, Nelson stated that Lucid had the potential to be one of the EV industry’s most relevant players, especially judging upon the performance and initial reviews of the Air Dream Edition sedan, Lucid’s first vehicle release.
In a note to investors, Nelson wrote “With first-class specs on its forthcoming luxury EV models, strong balance sheet and management team, and brand new factory in Arizona, LCID appears to check all the boxes of an industry newcomer with staying power.” The $25 price target was followed with adjusted EPS targets of ($1.65) for 2021, ($1.10) for 2022, ($0.70) for 2023, and ($0.25) for 2024. Despite the company’s status as a newcomer in the industry, especially as production of its first vehicle has yet to begin at its Casa Grande, Arizona, factory, Lucid has received considerable hype from enthusiasts and analysts. However, there are many challenges ahead, including sparring with notable EV sector leaders like Tesla.
Despite the competitive advantages, including the new factory, white-knuckle performance specifications, and a team of highly experienced individuals, Nelson stated that “investors might encounter some speed bumps, as LCID’s closest competitor (Tesla) has established a formidable competitive moat.” The Air Dream Edition sedan will spar head-to-head with the Tesla Model S Plaid, a reincarnation of the company’s first production vehicle, which could cause some uncertainty regarding the Air’s performance in sales. Car buyers may be prone to buy vehicles from an experienced automaker, despite the positive reviews of the Air.
Lucid holds an advantage in EPA range ratings, as the Air has already broken the 500-mile threshold with several of its vehicles, offering more than 100 miles of additional range compared to the Model S Long Range.
Just over a week after CFRA initiated coverage on Lucid Group, Nelson is now revising his price target by boosting it by $10 from $25 to $35 per share.
“We continue to like LCID’s strategy of targeting the luxury market, as the company will likely need to sell far fewer automobiles to achieve various milestones on the path to profitability,” Nelson writes. “With a balance sheet flush with cash following its recent SPAC transaction, brand new factory in Arizona, guidance of CEO and former Tesla Model S engineer Peter Rawlinson, mean reversion potential from where the stock traded as a SPAC, and most importantly, state-of-the-art vehicles which are getting rave reviews, we remain bullish on LCID shares.”
Essentially a reiteration of the initial investor note, Nelson identifies Lucid’s healthy balance sheet due to its financial backers and recent SPAC transaction with Churchill Capital Corp. IV, along with the experience and dedication offered by CEO and CTO Peter Rawlinson, who worked with Tesla during the design and engineering of the Model S.
Disclosure: Joey Klender is not a $LCID Shareholder.
Investor's Corner
NASA taps SpaceX to launch the telescope that could unlock new worlds
NASA’s Roman Space Telescope heads to orbit this August aboard SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy with massive scientific ambitions.
SpaceX is set to play a central role in one of NASA’s most anticipated science missions in years. The company’s Falcon Heavy rocket, currently the most powerful operational launch vehicle in the world, will carry the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope into orbit on August 30 from Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Roman is now in final preparations inside the Payload Hazardous Servicing Facility, where on June 26 technicians used a crane to lift the observatory into a specialized stand for fueling and pre-launch testing.
Roman is named after Nancy Grace Roman, NASA’s first chief of astronomy, whose career helped shape how the agency approaches space science.
NASA chose SpaceX Falcon Heavy because of Roman’s needs to reach a specific orbit far from Earth, well beyond where a standard Falcon 9 can deliver it. The Falcon Heavy, which first flew in 2018, has since become NASA’s go-to option for missions that need serious muscle without the cost and complexity of older launch systems.
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Roman will carry a field of view at least 100 times wider than the Hubble Space Telescope, meaning it can photograph enormous swaths of the universe in a single shot rather than the narrow slices Hubble captures. That difference in scale is significant. While Hubble reshaped our understanding of the cosmos over 30 years, Roman is built to work faster and wider, surveying hundreds of millions of galaxies at once.
One of Roman’s most compelling capabilities is its potential to discover and photograph planets orbiting stars outside our solar system, and with enough precision to directly image planets that would otherwise be lost. That means scientists could study the atmosphere and surface characteristics of distant worlds rather than simply confirming they exist. Combined with Roman’s sweeping field of view, the telescope could detect thousands of exoplanets, and some of those planets may be in habitable zones where liquid water could exist. No telescope currently in operation has this level of power and capability. That capability alone could change what we know about other worlds, and perhaps finally answer the question: are we the only intelligent lifeforms in existence?
What Roman actually finds once it reaches orbit is an open question, and that is exactly what makes this launch worth watching.
Elon Musk
California snubs Tesla in its newly passed EV incentive that favors Rivian and Lucid
California passed a $135 million EV incentive that rewards Rivian and Lucid while sidelining Tesla
California just drew a line in the EV incentive sand to put Tesla on the wrong side of it. The state recently passed a $135 million program offering first-time electric vehicle buyers a direct incentive with no application required, but the rules were written in a way that leaves Tesla at a structural disadvantage compared to Rivian and Lucid.
The program caps eligible vehicles at $50,000 for new EVs and $25,000 for used ones. That pricing threshold rules out a significant portion of Tesla’s lineup, though some lower-priced Model 3 and Model Y configurations would still qualify. California-based automakers are exempt from the price cap entirely, regardless of what their vehicles cost. Rivian, headquartered in Irvine, and Lucid, based in the San Francisco Bay Area, both benefit from that exemption. Rivian’s R2 starts at roughly $45,000 but has versions above the cap. Lucid’s Air and Gravity start at $70,990 and $79,990 respectively, well above any threshold a non-California company would face.
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Tesla built its reputation and a significant portion of its early market share in California, where EV adoption has consistently led the nation. The company operates its original factory in Fremont, California, and the state was home to Tesla’s headquarters for most of its existence. That changed in 2021 when Tesla moved its corporate headquarters to Austin, Texas. Since then, the relationship between the company and California Governor Gavin Newsom has been openly adversarial, with Musk and Newsom trading public criticism on multiple occasions.
California’s EV incentive landscape has shifted repeatedly in recent years, and Tesla has previously lost eligibility for state-level programs as its vehicles exceeded income-adjusted price thresholds. The federal $7,500 EV tax credit, which Tesla models have qualified for and lost depending on policy cycles, is no longer available after it expired without renewal, making state-level programs more meaningful to buyers than they have been in years.
The practical impact for buyers is more nuanced than the headline suggests. California residents purchasing a Tesla under $50,000 for the first time can still access the incentive. But the exemption written for California-based manufacturers is a structural advantage that rewards where a company plants its headquarters flag rather than where it builds its products, and Tesla moved that flag to Texas.
Elon Musk
SpaceX’s newest logo confirms everything about what it’s become
SpaceX officially absorbed xAI under the SpaceXAI brand, completing the largest private merger in history.
SpaceX made its corporate transformation official in May 2026 when Elon Musk posted on X that xAI would cease to exist as a standalone company. “xAI will be dissolved as a separate company, so it will just be SpaceXAI, the AI products from SpaceX,” he wrote.
A new SpaceXAI logo was announced today, visually embedding the xAI letters inside the SpaceX identity, which can be seen as a deliberate design choice that signals the merger is not a partnership but a full absorption and XAi a core function of the same company. The same way Starlink is not a separate brand but a SpaceX product. The announcement closed the loop on a process that began February 2, 2026, when SpaceX acquired xAI in the largest private merger in history, valued at $1.25 trillion. SpaceX at $1 trillion and xAI at $250 billion.
We are now @SpaceXAI. pic.twitter.com/ema66xDWC9
— SpaceXAI (@SpaceXAI) July 6, 2026
The reason SpaceX bought xAI was stated plainly by Musk at the time of the deal: to build orbital data centers. SpaceX had simultaneously filed with the FCC to launch up to one million satellites designed to function as AI compute nodes in low Earth orbit, escaping what Musk described as the energy constraints limiting AI development on Earth.
xAI provided the AI software stack, with Grok, the X platform, and the Colossus supercomputer infrastructure in Memphis with over 220,000 NVIDIA GPUs, while SpaceX provided the rockets, Starlink, and the capital base to fund it. The two companies needed each other. xAI was burning $2.5 billion in losses on $250 million in revenue. SpaceX was generating an estimated $8 billion in profit on $15 billion in revenue and needed an AI narrative to command the valuation it was targeting for its IPO.
What SpaceX has done, regardless of how the orbital AI vision ultimately plays out, is walk into a public market as something no company has been before: a rocket manufacturer, satellite internet provider, AI software company, social media platform, and supercomputer operator under one ticker. Whether that combination is worth $2 trillion depends entirely on which of those businesses you believe in most.
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