A few weeks ago, Elon Musk’s rocket company became the largest initial public offering (IPO) in history. Since then, its stock has behaved less like a blue-chip investment and more like a rollercoaster – and that volatility has turned a simple-sounding question into one of the thorniest puzzles in modern finance: What is SpaceX actually worth?
SpaceX raised approximately USD 75 billion at a valuation of USD 1.77 trillion when it debuted on the Nasdaq on June 12, 2026, priced at USD 135 a share. Shares jumped more than 19% on their first day of trading, pushing the company’s market value to roughly USD 2.1 trillion.
Four days later, the stock had climbed further still, giving SpaceX a market valuation of around USD 2.64 trillion, and making it briefly one of the largest companies on the planet, nearly overtaking Amazon.
Then came the fall. The stock peaked at USD 225.64 intraday on June 16 before sliding for three consecutive sessions. By early July, it had settled into a choppy range around USD 157 to USD 158. In other words, in under a month, the market’s estimate of SpaceX’s worth has swung by hundreds of billions of dollars – sometimes in a single trading day.
Three very different bets
Understanding why valuing SpaceX is so difficult starts with understanding what it actually is now. It is no longer simply a rocket company. The investment case rests on three pillars: The Starlink satellite internet constellation, the Starship launch vehicle programme, and a push into artificial intelligence infrastructure through the absorption of Musk’s xAI venture, which completed its merger with SpaceX in February 2026, making AI operations a third major business segment.
Of these, Starlink is by far the biggest earner today. According to SpaceX’s own prospectus, Starlink generated roughly 61% of total company revenue in 2025 – about USD 11.4 billion, up around 50% on the year before. By the end of March 2026, the service had surpassed 10.3 million active customers across 160 countries, more than double its subscriber count at the close of 2024. That growth has come with a catch, though. Analyst Aswath Damodaran of New York University notes that average monthly revenue per Starlink subscriber has actually fallen, from USD 99 in 2024 to USD 66 in the first quarter of 2026, even as subscriber numbers have more than doubled and profitability has improved.
The rocket business (launches using Falcon 9, Falcon Heavy, and the newer Starship) remains the company’s original calling card, and its cost advantages over rivals appear to be widening rather than narrowing.
The AI arm is the wildcard: It is expanding computing capacity rapidly, but there is little public data yet on how profitable it might become.
Taken together, SpaceX booked $18.674 billion in revenue for 2025, with adjusted earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation of about USD 6.6 billion, but also a GAAP net loss of nearly USD 5 billion for the year. Morningstar analyst Nicolas Owens projects revenue could roughly double again in 2026, reaching an estimated USD 36.8 billion.
Why analysts can’t agree
That mismatch – a trillion-dollar valuation sitting atop a loss-making balance sheet – is precisely what has divided Wall Street.
In the weeks before the float, analysts at Morningstar sounded an early alarm. Using a discounted cash-flow model, they put SpaceX’s fair value at just USD 780 billion, roughly half the USD 1.5 trillion the company had commanded in private markets, judging that the firm’s prospects, particularly around xAI’s profitability, were too uncertain to justify the asking price.
They were not alone in raising eyebrows over the arithmetic. AJ Bell’s Dan Coatsworth calculated that a USD 1.75 trillion valuation implied a price-to-sales ratio of roughly 67 times – about three times richer than Nvidia’s rating on the same measure, and noted that outsiders know relatively little about SpaceX’s true financial health given Musk’s control of 85% of the company’s voting rights.
Since the IPO, the multiples have only stretched further. Measured against 2025 revenue, SpaceX now trades at a price-to-sales ratio of around 141; even using the more optimistic 2026 forecast, that ratio is close to 78 – more than three times Broadcom’s multiple and around 26 times Amazon’s. Morningstar’s own per-share fair value estimate, at USD 62, implies the stock is trading at roughly 3.2 times what the firm considers it actually worth, making SpaceX the second most expensive stock in Morningstar’s entire coverage universe, behind only Bloom Energy.
Not everyone reads the numbers so bearishly. Some market participants argue that conventional metrics undersell a company attempting something genuinely novel – building space-based infrastructure and AI computing capacity simultaneously – and that early-stage disruptive businesses have always looked ‘overvalued’ by the standards of mature industries.
Academic valuation specialist Aswath Damodaran, who has tracked SpaceX’s numbers closely both before and after its prospectus was published, frames the disagreement differently. He argues the value of a company like SpaceX is driven less by this year’s revenue or profit and more by the underlying story investors believe about how three separate businesses – space launch, satellite connectivity, and AI – will each grow, how profitable each can eventually become, and how much fresh capital each will need to get there. Damodaran has revised his own estimates as more detail emerged from the company’s regulatory filings, a reminder that even sophisticated models remain work-in-progress for a company this unusual.
A volatile stock, a demanding market
The gap between bulls and bears has made SpaceX shares unusually turbulent for a company of its size. Roughly $800 billion worth of insider-held shares will become eligible for sale by October, once the post-IPO lockup period ends – a potential wave of selling that could pressure the price further. The free float at listing was thin, at only around 4.2% of outstanding shares, which analysts say has amplified price swings in both directions.
Recent trading has underlined the point. Shares dropped nearly 8% in a single session after Musk denied a media report about a SpaceX-linked AI device, only to claw back some ground the next day.
SpaceX becoming a part of the Nasdaq-100 index on July 7 was expected to trigger fresh buying from index-tracking funds, another reminder that near-term price moves may say as much about market mechanics as about the underlying business.
So, how much is it worth?
The honest answer is that nobody agrees. Depending on which measure you trust, SpaceX has been valued anywhere from Morningstar’s cautious USD 780 billion, to its USD 1.77 trillion IPO price, to a peak market capitalisation north of USD 2.6 trillion – a spread wide enough to swallow the entire economies of most countries.
What is clear is that the market is no longer pricing SpaceX as a rocket company. It is pricing it as a bet on whether Musk can pull off the same trick three times at once: Dominate space launch, scale a satellite internet business to hundreds of millions of customers, and build a competitive AI infrastructure arm – all while burning billions of dollars a year to do it. Whether that bet pays off as handsomely as Tesla eventually did for its early investors, or serves as a cautionary tale about valuations getting ahead of fundamentals, will likely take years, not months, to become clear.
For now, investors weighing whether to buy in are left balancing a company with genuinely extraordinary technology and market position against a price tag that, by almost every conventional yardstick, assumes the future will unfold very close to perfectly.