Skeptics Question Whether SpaceX Is Worth $1.77 Trillion

SpaceX posted $18.7 billion in 2025 revenue. A typical premium valuation for a top-tier tech company with excellent growth potential might be around 10x to 14x revenue, which would imply a strong IPO valuation of roughly $187 billion to $262 billion. Against that benchmark, a trillion-dollar-plus valuation is astonishing. At that level, investors would be paying far beyond normal tech-company multiples. I suspect many people buying into the IPO could end up losing money.

SpaceX lost $4.3 billion in the first three months of the year alone. Revenue was $4.7 billion and growing, but it was far lower than that of tech giants like Meta, which brought in $56.3 billion in the same period and has a stock market valuation of $1.4 trillion.

If this was only impacting folks who choose to invest in SpaceX that would be one thing. But they are forcing SpaceX down the throats of anyone who has a 401(k) and down the throats of anyone who has index funds such as QQQ, and Nasdaq suspended their normal rules for including SpaceX.

Goldman Sachs--they are leading the IPO process--told a potential investor that it expected SpaceX’s total revenue to reach $474 billion in 2030, up from $18.7 billion last year. So 25x in just 4 years. Morgan Stanley, which is also working on the IPO, said in an analysis shared with investors that it anticipated SpaceX’s revenue would hit $3.4 trillion by 2040.

I hope Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley are sued out of existence for perpetuating this fraud.

Alphaville:" Getting a lot of banks involved in an IPO has a side benefit: it subdues the potential for criticism. Every firm brought into the tent by an issuer, beyond a vested interest in being nice, has to abide by the rules. In the US, these include a blackout period for publishing research of 40 days for lead underwriters and 25 days for everyone else.

With SpaceX using 23 banks for its capital raise, independent research about the record-breaking float has been very hard to come by. That alone is our reason to raise awareness of a couple of notes from the team at Morningstar.

Their headline findings are:

The stock’s probably worth $63 per share, a 53 per cent discount to the $135 issue price.

SpaceX probably has an addressable market of about $129bn, rather than the $1.6tn claimed in its S-1 filing.

In a (metaphorical) moonshot scenario, where SpaceX pioneers orbital data centres and captures 20 per cent of AI computing capacity by 2040, the company would be worth $1.97tn, or $154 per share.

Morningstar assigns only a 7 per cent per cent chance of the moonshot scenario happening.

For Starlink, Morningstar estimates the global market to be worth about $129bn, which is rather less SpaceX’s estimate of $1.6tn. “[T]echnical constraints and unit economics limit the business primarily to lower-density markets,” it says.

Space cadets and attached bankers, do please tell us in the comments what Morningstar gets wrong."

Not skeptics, people with functioning brain.