SpaceX closes at over $2T in valuation, cementing Musk as first trillionaire

Before an IPO begins trading, traders observe an indicated price range that is updated frequently as buy and sell orders are placed or modified. The shares are not expected to begin trading until later on Friday.

Shares in other space companies, such as AST SpaceMobile, Viasat, and Rocket Lab, dipped in early trading as investors awaited SpaceX’s the market debut.

The company’s valuation has already exceeded that of JPMorgan Chase, Berkshire Hathaway, Eli Lilly, Meta Platforms, and Musk’s Tesla. The optimism around the stock is high despite SpaceX reporting a loss last year and generating revenue that is substantially lower than other mega-cap companies.

The previous largest IPO was Saudi Aramco’s December 2019 offering, which raised $25.6 billion at a $1.71 trillion valuation. In inflation-adjusted terms, Aramco raised $33.2 billion at a $2.21 trillion value.

Founded in 2002, SpaceX says that its mission is “to build the systems and technologies necessary to make life multiplanetary, to understand the true nature of the universe, and to extend the light of consciousness to the stars.”

The company said its space operation accounts for more than four-fifths of the mass launched into orbit over the past three years. Its Starlink internet service connects customers across 164 countries, territories and other markets. Starlink currently generates most of SpaceX’s revenue.

SpaceX allocated 30% of shares for retail buyers and determined Thursday’s offering price before conducting the traditional roadshow that bankers and investors typically use to negotiate IPO terms. Retail demand for the new listing was reported by Bloomberg News to be over $100 billion, not to mention heavy institutional demand with BlackRock alone placing a $5 billion order, according to the WSJ.

BULLS AND BEARS LINE UP AHEAD OF HISTORIC LISTING

Beneath that headline enthusiasm for the SpaceX IPO lies one of the sharpest valuation debates in recent IPO history, with bulls and bears separated by as much as 200% on what the stock is actually worth.

The bull case: vertically integrated AI giant

Oppenheimer became the first major brokerage to initiate coverage of SpaceX, issuing an ’outperform’ rating with a $190 price target — implying roughly 41% upside from the offer price. Analyst Timothy Horan framed the company in sweeping terms: “We see it as the only vertically integrated AI company with the required capital, data, LLMs, hardware, manufacturing and engineering talent.”

New Street Research added a $165 12-month target, and the broader bull argument rests on Starlink’s structural dominance. SpaceX’s satellite internet division accounts for roughly 60% of the company’s $18.67 billion in 2025 revenue, serving approximately 10.3 million users across a constellation of 9,600 satellites. For bulls, that network — combined with the xAI merger completed in early 2026 and ambitions around orbital data centers — represents a compounding moat that no competitor can easily replicate.

Meanwhile, Goldman Sachs projections of a 100-fold surge in AI revenue to $322 billion by 2030 are central to the most optimistic underwriter models, though the credibility of that trajectory remains an open question.

The bear case: 90x sales and a loss-making 2025

Skeptics are harder to dismiss than the order book might suggest. Morningstar values SpaceX at just $63 per share, a 53% discount to the IPO price, and calls the company “significantly overvalued.” Notably, even Morningstar’s most optimistic “moonshot” scenario, assigned only a 7% probability, yields just $154 per share, barely above the offer price. Valuation professor Aswath Damodaran puts the enterprise value at $1.22 trillion, well below the implied IPO figure.

Short seller Jim Chanos, speaking at an iConnections conference, put the core concern bluntly: “The company is not worth, in my opinion, $1.75 trillion based on any reasonable assumptions over the next five years. We really can build whatever stories we want — colonies on Mars, factory tunnels, data centers in space — to justify the valuation. In bull markets, you put a premium on promises and in bear markets, you put a discount on reality.”

Chanos highlighted that SpaceX trades at roughly 90x sales, versus Tesla’s 14x multiple, a striking premium for a company that swung to a $4.94 billion net loss in 2025 after merging with the money-losing xAI, reversing a $791 million profit in 2024. Revenue did rise 33% year-over-year, but profitability moved sharply in the wrong direction.

The governance structure compounds the risk. Elon Musk retains an estimated 80–85% of voting rights, giving public shareholders limited influence over strategy. Ben Ritchie, head of developed market equities at Aberdeen Investments, captured the tension: “The IPO will test investors’ willingness to embrace a new model of public equity ownership: high valuation, limited governance rights, and faith in a founder-driven vision. That combination has worked before. But at this scale?”

Index mechanics add another wrinkle: while Nasdaq recently changed listing rules to ease SPCX’s path toward Nasdaq 100 inclusion, S&P Global declined to make exceptions for early S&P 500 entry, meaning forced buying from passive index funds may be delayed longer than some investors anticipate. Investing.com analysis has also warned that retail investors risk providing “exit liquidity” for pre-IPO holders, drawing parallels to prior mega-IPOs where early institutional sellers captured the largest gains.