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Today is IPO day: Is SpaceX a buy?

SpaceX hits the market in the largest IPO in history. Why is everyone talking about it? There's more behind the hype than meets the eye.

Today is IPO day: Is SpaceX a buy?

Today SpaceX lists on the Nasdaq under the ticker SPCX. At $135 per share, the company raised $75 billion 1 — the largest raise in IPO history, roughly triple Saudi Aramco's 2019 record 2 — at a valuation of $1.77 trillion. 1 Before we start: this is not a buy or sell recommendation. It's a way of looking at the same event from both sides, so you have more context when evaluating your investments. Here's the bull case, the bear case, and some macro context to close.

Why you SHOULD buy the SpaceX IPO

  • Great founders see the future, inspire others with their vision, and then pull that future into the present. It's impressive to watch a founder do this once in a career: Musk has done it with digital finance, EVs, and reusable rockets.

  • The last company Musk took public, Tesla, has returned more than 33,000% since its 2010 IPO — about 44% per year, compounded, for sixteen years. 3

  • Space has emerged as both a major commercial opportunity and a national defense priority, and SpaceX owns it: Starlink serves more than 10 million subscriptions 4 and accounts for roughly two-thirds of all active satellites in orbit. 5 Last year SpaceX flew 165 missions — its closest competitor flew 18 — and carried over 80% of all mass sent to orbit worldwide. 6 That is a deep moat, supporting both SpaceX's pricing power and near-term growth potential.

  • Rockets are cool.

Why you should NOT buy the SpaceX IPO

  • Start with the company's own prospectus. It claims a $28.5 trillion market opportunity — "the largest actionable total addressable market in human history." If you actually read the IPO filing, however, more than 90% of that is artificial intelligence; space itself is just $370 billion of it. 7 By its own math, SPCX the rocket company is one of the market's largest bets yet on AI.

  • That's because SPCX is no longer just a rocket company: it also rolls up xAI and X (formerly Twitter), which together lost $6.4 billion from operations on $3.2 billion of revenue in 2025. 8 The rocket-and-Starlink core is a genuinely great business — roughly $8 billion of EBITDA on $15–16 billion of sales. But the bundle you're buying lost $4.9 billion last year, and is currently burning over $1 billion a month. 9

    • The optimistic view: Musk the visionary sees synergies among these enterprises that the rest of us haven't spotted yet.

    • The cynical view: a profitable, beloved rocket company is packaging Musk's loss-making AI ventures while riding the hype cycle.

  • SPCX is priced at roughly 95 times trailing sales, with revenue growing 33% per year. 10 For comparison, Google went public at about 10 times trailing sales while profitable – at 120x earnings — and growing 140% a year. 11 Facebook listed at roughly 26 times sales (~100x earnings), with growth decelerating — and fell 47% within three months of its IPO (although clearly its story worked out well over the long run). 12 Even Amazon, the poster child of speculative '90s IPOs, priced at about 28 times sales — while growing over 800% a year. 13 SPCX is asking three to nine times their sales multiples, on a fraction of their growth. Entry prices matter.

  • Unusual governance: Musk's super-voting Class B shares carry 10 votes each, giving him about 82% of the vote with about 42% of the equity. 14 He effectively can never be fired. Reasonable people disagree about whether that's a feature or a bug; either way, it gives him full autonomy — and a time horizon that may be very different from yours.

  • History is not kind to mega-listings: the three largest before this one — Aramco, Alibaba, and Facebook — all traded below their offer price within twelve months. 15

  • SpaceX's AI revenues warrant a closer look, with the largest customers signing up just before the IPO. While Anthropic's $45 billion compute deal 16 is at least arm's-length, Google's $30 billion deal 17 is not: Alphabet owns roughly 5% of the combined company. 18 Its Gemini models genuinely need the compute; at the same time, its stake gives it a clear interest in the optics of a marquee deal signed a week before listing. With Anthropic's own IPO on deck, it has a clear vested interest in sustaining current market price levels.

Notes on markets

U.S. equities are exceptionally expensive right now. The Buffett Indicator — the value of the stock market against GDP — sits near 230%, an all-time high. 19 The Shiller P/E is around 41, a level exceeded only once: at the peak of the dot-com bubble. 20 Interest rates are under pressure: the Fed is on hold at 3.50–3.75%, 21 headline inflation is back above 4% on energy prices, 22 and the European Central Bank just raised rates by 25 basis points — its first hike in nearly three years. 23

And yet, this is not 1999. Earnings grew 27% last quarter, 24 and the market's leaders generate real cash flow — Nvidia, which books much of the AI build-out as revenue at enviable margins, is the iconic case. But in spite of the immense enthusiasm, CFOs, developers, and other knowledge workers are increasingly pushing back on the gap between AI's promise and its measured results: widely cited research found that roughly 95% of corporate AI pilots produce no measurable financial return, 25 and last week Sam Altman conceded that cost has become the second most common complaint from OpenAI's enterprise customers — "nobody cared about costs" earlier this year, he admitted, while companies like Uber now cap employees' AI tool spending after burning through a full-year AI budget in four months. 26 The key question for the entire industry is whether the $700–800 billion of AI capex being spent this year alone 27 will earn a payback that justifies it.

So is now the time to buy?

That depends on your beliefs about Elon Musk as a founder, about AI, space, and the overall market. Two reasonable positions:

  • The bull case: Musk is a generational talent who has defied his critics over and over again. If his track record at Tesla is at all predictive, SpaceX can grow into its valuation on a timescale that works for you. You also believe inflation pressure will fade, the Fed will get back to cutting, American growth will stay robust, and that the "AI in space" opportunity is as large as Musk claims. If this describes your worldview, today is a great day to start a position.

  • The bear case: SpaceX is a great company that is at least 2x overvalued, bundled with loss-making AI ventures and a controlling shareholder who answers to no one. Inflation is back, rate cuts are on pause, and AI earnings lean on capex that revenues don't yet justify. Both the company and the market are priced for perfection. Even if you love rockets and sci-fi, wait for a better entry point — or take a position you'd be comfortable seeing down 50% over the next 6–24 months.

With SPCX trading today, and OpenAI and Anthropic both confidentially filing to go public this month, 28 2026 is shaping up to be a historic year for markets. To support you in this environment, we'll soon be launching VestAI 2.0 — a dramatically enhanced research platform you can use to compose, trade, and automate strategies, and to receive detailed analytics and insights from your past performance.

Stay tuned, and happy investing.

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References:

  1. SpaceX IPO terms — $135/share, ~$75B raised, Nasdaq "SPCX", $1.77T valuation: CNBC; CoinDesk; Cryptobriefing.

  2. Largest raise in history, ~3x Aramco's 2019 record: Motley Fool — Biggest IPOs Ever; Weiss Ratings; Brookings (Aramco 2019).

  3. Tesla return since 2010 IPO (~33,000%+, ~44% CAGR): stockanalysis.com; Macrotrends.

  4. Starlink 10M+ subscriptions (per S-1): Trending Topics; spacexstock.com.

  5. ~Two-thirds of all active satellites: Scientific American; planet4589 / J. McDowell.

  6. 165 launches in 2025; closest competitor 18; >80% of global mass-to-orbit: Via Satellite / BryceTech; SpaceNews.

  7. $28.5T TAM, ">90% AI, space $370B": SpaceX S-1 (SEC.gov); Fortune; Benzinga (TAM breakdown).

  8. xAI + X: $6.4B operating loss on $3.2B revenue: TechCrunch; Morningstar.

  9. Consolidated 2025 net loss $4.94B; burn >$1B/month; core ~$8B EBITDA on $15–16B sales: Via Satellite; Fortune.

  10. SPCX ~95x trailing sales ($1.77T / $18.7B revenue), growing 33% — Vest calculation based on the filings in [7]–[9].

  11. Google IPO 2004 — ~10x sales / ~120x earnings / +141% revenue: Google S-1 (SEC.gov); CNN; Crunchbase News.

  12. Facebook IPO 2012 — ~26x sales / ~100x earnings / −47% within ~3 months: Wikipedia; TechCrunch; Crunchbase News.

  13. Amazon IPO 1997 — ~28x sales, no P/E, +841% revenue: Amazon IPO press release; TechCrunch retrospective.

  14. Class B 10 votes/share; Musk ~42% equity, ~82% voting post-IPO: investingLive; NYC Comptroller letter.

  15. Aramco, Alibaba, Facebook all below offer within 12 months: CNBC (Aramco); Fortune (Alibaba); CBC (Facebook). Broader base rates: Nasdaq Economic Research; Ritter, U. Florida.

  16. Anthropic–xAI compute deal (~$45B): Cryptobriefing.

  17. Google–xAI compute deal (~$30B, ~$920M/month): TechCrunch; DataCenterDynamics.

  18. Alphabet ~5% stake in the combined entity: Investing.com; Yahoo Finance / Benzinga.

  19. Buffett Indicator ~230% (record region): GuruFocus; Current Market Valuation.

  20. Shiller CAPE ~41, exceeded only Dec 1999: GuruFocus CAPE; Shiller data, Yale.

  21. Fed on hold 3.50–3.75%: Fed FOMC statement; CME FedWatch.

  22. May CPI +4%+ headline: BLS CPI release; Fox Business.

  23. ECB +25bp, first hike since 2023: ECB monetary policy decision; CNBC.

  24. S&P 500 Q1 2026 earnings +27%: FactSet; FactSet (Mag-7).

  25. ~95% of corporate AI pilots no measurable return: Guinness GI; Goldman Sachs.

  26. Altman cost concession; Uber AI-spend cap: TheStreet; Fello AI.

  27. 2026 hyperscaler AI capex ~$700–800B: CNBC; Tom's Hardware.

  28. Anthropic confidential S-1 (Jun 1 2026): CNBC; CNN. OpenAI confidential S-1 (Jun 8 2026): OpenTools; Investing.com.