Who Is Buying SpaceX at a $1.7 Trillion Valuation?

SpaceX is about to pull off the largest IPO in Wall Street history, and the number attached to it is staggering. The company priced its offering at a fixed $135 per share, plans to sell 555.6 million shares to raise roughly $75 billion, and is targeting a valuation of about $1.77 trillion when SPCX starts trading on the Nasdaq. At that price it would instantly become the seventh-most-valuable company in the United States, larger than Tesla. You can read the official pricing details in CNBC''s coverage of the roadshow.

So the obvious question for anyone thinking about requesting shares: is SpaceX stock actually a buy here, or is this a great company arriving at a punishing price? SpaceX is one of the most remarkable businesses on the planet, but the IPO price asks you to pay for a future that has not been built yet.

What Is SpaceX''s Annual Revenue in 2026?

According to its S-1 filing with the SEC, SpaceX generated $18.7 billion in revenue in 2025, up about 33% from $14.1 billion in 2024. That growth is real, but two things jump out once you look past the headline. First, the company posted a net loss of $4.9 billion on the year even while reporting adjusted EBITDA of $6.58 billion, which tells you how capital-intensive this business is. Second, growth is cooling. First-quarter 2026 revenue came in at $4.69 billion, and year-over-year growth slowed to 15%, a deceleration the company''s marketing materials do not exactly highlight.

The business splits into three segments: Connectivity (Starlink), Space (rocket launches), and AI (the recently absorbed xAI). Only one of those three is carrying the weight.

Starlink Is the Profit Engine Behind the Whole Company

Strip away the rockets and the AI hype and you find that Starlink is the actual cash machine. The segment booked $11.4 billion in revenue in 2025, roughly 61% of the company total, growing 50% year over year and generating $4.4 billion in operating income. That is genuine, scaled, profitable business, and it is compounding quickly.

The subscriber story explains why. Starlink crossed 10 million subscribers in early 2026, up from around 9 million at the end of 2025, and management is guiding toward 25 million by year-end. The next leg of growth is direct-to-cell, where SpaceX spent roughly $17 billion plus another $2.6 billion acquiring wireless spectrum from EchoStar to beam service straight to ordinary phones in partnership with carriers like T-Mobile, a deal that also handed EchoStar a meaningful equity stake. Add airline contracts, maritime customers, and government work to a subscriber base generating more than $1,000 in annual revenue each, and Starlink looks like critical infrastructure rather than a science project. If you are paying $1.77 trillion for anything here, this is the part that earns its keep.

The Rocket Business Is the Brand, Not the Bulk of Revenue

This is where investor perception and financial reality drift apart. SpaceX flew 165 orbital launches in 2025 and put roughly 83% of all mass that reached orbit into space, an operational dominance no competitor comes close to matching. Yet the rocket division produced only about $4.1 billion in revenue, a fraction of Starlink.

The forward story rests on Starship, the fully reusable mega-rocket targeting roughly $100 per kilogram to orbit. After a rough start to 2025 that included several explosive test failures, the program stabilized, and the FAA has now cleared up to 25 launches per year from the Starbase facility in Texas. Musk is targeting an uncrewed Starship flight to Mars by late 2026, which he himself frames as a coin-flip probability, with crewed missions penciled in for 2029 to 2031. The rockets are the reason SpaceX exists and the source of its mystique. They are not, today, the reason for a trillion-dollar-plus price tag.

Why the $1.77 Trillion SpaceX Valuation Is Really an AI Bet

Most retail investors are missing what really changed in February 2026, when SpaceX absorbed Musk''s AI company xAI in an all-stock deal that valued xAI at $250 billion and SpaceX at $1 trillion, folding Grok and the Colossus data centers into a new segment branded SpaceXAI. That single move converted SpaceX from a space-and-satellite company into an AI infrastructure story wearing a rocket costume, and the financials of that segment are brutal.

The AI division lost $6.36 billion in 2025, and in the first quarter of 2026 it produced just $818 million in revenue against a $2.47 billion operating loss. Independent research firm Morningstar expects xAI to burn around $10 billion in 2026 and has flatly called it a material threat of value destruction with an unclear competitive moat. Grok has struggled to win users outside of X, and all twelve of xAI''s co-founders have departed.

The one piece of near-term AI revenue is, ironically, a deal with a direct competitor. Anthropic, the maker of Claude, agreed to pay SpaceX $1.25 billion a month through May 2029 (a contract worth roughly $45 billion) to rent the Colossus 1 supercomputer in Memphis and its 220,000-plus Nvidia GPUs. That cash is real and helpful, but the arrangement is telling. SpaceX is effectively operating as a cloud landlord because Grok could not absorb all that compute, the contract carries a 90-day termination clause, and the pricing reportedly sits below the AI segment''s own break-even, which means it props up revenue without proving profitability.

SpaceX Revenue and Valuation Projections for 2030

The bull case lives or dies on AI, and the numbers underwriters are circulating are eye-watering. Goldman Sachs, the lead bank on the deal, projects SpaceX total revenue reaching $474 billion by 2030, a roughly 25-fold jump from 2025. The breakdown is the whole story: AI revenue of $322 billion (a 100-fold surge from about $3.2 billion in 2025), Starlink at $144 billion, and rockets at just $8.3 billion. Goldman also models adjusted EBITDA climbing to $352 billion and free cash flow swinging from negative $13.8 billion in 2025 to positive $72 billion by 2031.

That $322 billion AI figure is the load-bearing wall of the entire valuation, and it rests on a claim in the prospectus that xAI addresses a $26.5 trillion total addressable market, dwarfing the roughly $2 trillion outlined for Starlink and space combined. A total addressable market is not a revenue line. It is a ceiling, and the gap between an aspirational ceiling and an actual income statement is exactly where this thesis can crack, especially with Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic all currently outrunning Grok.

On the valuation side, the most-cited long-term model comes from ARK Invest, which pegs an expected enterprise value of roughly $2.5 trillion by 2030, with a bull case near $3.1 trillion and a bear case around $1.7 trillion. SpaceX itself was valued at $350 billion in late 2024 and around $800 billion in a December 2025 tender offer before this $1.77 trillion IPO. From the listing price, even ARK''s optimistic base case implies only about 7% to 8% annual returns, and the bear case is essentially flat. The explosive gains in this name have already happened in the private market. IPO buyers are arriving after the party for the easy money.

SpaceX Intrinsic Value: What Is the Company Actually Worth?

Value investors do not buy stories; they buy cash flows, and they insist on paying less than a business is worth so that a mistake still leaves room to recover. By that standard SpaceX is a hard company to own, because it lost $4.9 billion in 2025, burned $13.8 billion in free cash flow, pays no dividend, and through its dual-class structure leaves outside shareholders with almost no say over how capital gets spent. A strict margin-of-safety investor screens it out before the analysis even begins.

The business does have real intrinsic value, though, and a sum-of-the-parts estimate shows where it sits. Almost all of it is Starlink:

• Starlink is the crown jewel, a recurring-revenue infrastructure business with a 63% adjusted EBITDA margin and 50% growth. At 18 to 25 times its $11.4 billion in revenue, or a discounted cash flow on its subscriber ramp toward 17 million users, it is worth roughly $200 billion to $350 billion.
• Launch and Starship dominate the market but generate modest revenue near $4.1 billion and consume heavy capital, so at aerospace multiples the division is worth about $40 billion to $70 billion, with Mars and Starship treated as optionality rather than base-case value.
• The AI segment is the value trap. It loses around $10 billion a year, so a conservative investor nets its data center hardware against the cash burn and lands near $0 to $50 billion, far below the $250 billion the xAI merger implied.

Add the pieces and a defensible intrinsic value sits near $350 billion to $450 billion, stretching toward $600 billion on generous assumptions, with Morningstar''s $780 billion fair value marking the optimistic edge. That range brackets the roughly $350 billion the private market assigned SpaceX in late 2024, before AI mania took hold. Against a $1.77 trillion offer price and a price-to-sales multiple near 95 times its 2025 revenue, even the most generous honest estimate is less than half the IPO valuation. For a value investor there is no margin of safety here, only a margin of danger, and the disciplined move is to wait for a post-listing washout back toward what the business is actually worth.

Key Takeaways

• SpaceX IPOs at $1.77 trillion, the largest stock listing in history.
• Starlink earns the profits while the valuation rests on unproven AI growth.
• At over 90 times sales, the entry price demands near-perfection.

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Disclaimer: This article is for informational purposes only and should not be considered financial advice. Stock investing involves significant risk, including potential loss of principal. Always conduct your own research and consult with a qualified financial advisor before making investment decisions.