Intuitive Machines heads into its June 4 earnings report with a rare split personality. Analysts have been racing to raise price targets. Short sellers haven't moved. The stock is up 78% in a month — and both camps are digging in.
Five separate target raises have landed since May 15. Roth Capital's Suji Desilva went from $35 to $50 after earnings — then raised again to $75 on May 28, a 50% jump in one week. Cantor Fitzgerald moved from $26 to $43. Canaccord Genuity went from $24 to $41. B. Riley lifted to $45. Every action was a maintain-with-raise, not a new buy — conviction held, targets chased the stock higher.
The mean analyst target now sits at $40.78. The stock closed at $43.83 on May 29 — already above the consensus. Roth's $75 target is the outlier pulling the average; strip that out and the stock is trading at or above most sell-side views.
SI stands at 26.6% of float — up 9.2% over the past week. That follows the pattern flagged in earlier notes: bears are adding into the rally, not covering. The ORTEX short score of 68.8 places in the 4th percentile for short score rank. It screens as more heavily shorted than 96% of the tracked universe.
Borrow availability has eased somewhat from the extreme lows seen earlier in May — availability is currently at 19.4%, up from single digits on May 4–8. That's still tight. For every five shares already borrowed, only one remains available to lend. The lending market is constrained, but not at peak stress.
Chairman and Founder Kamal Ghaffarian sold roughly $4.86M in stock on May 18 alone across six separate transactions. He sold a further $3.57M on May 4. That's over $8M in insider selling in three weeks — into a stock that has nearly doubled in a month.
Ghaffarian still holds 3.6M shares, roughly 2.3% of the company. The sales are consistent with a pre-planned program but the timing — directly ahead of earnings — adds a data point that short sellers likely note.
The put/call ratio closed at 0.433 on May 29, pulling back from the 0.68–0.74 extremes seen earlier in the week. That's still 2.4 standard deviations above the 20-day mean. Options positioning has moderated but remains skewed defensive relative to recent history.
June 4 earnings will be the arbiter. The last print on May 14 saw a 5% drop on the day and 4% over five days. The print before that — in May 2026 — delivered a 10.8% gain and 15.9% over five sessions. Bears are positioned for disappointment. Analysts are priced for another beat.
Data summary
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