SpaceX (NASDAQ:SPCX) stock begins trading Friday (12 June) at $135 per share. The initial public offering (IPO) targets a $75bn raise at a $1.77trn valuation — the largest IPO ever.
There have been some concerns about liquidity ($75bn is a lot of money to raise) and demand, but that appears to have been put to bed.
The order books are already around two times oversubscribed. However, that level of oversubscription doesn’t guarantees a strong first-day pop — other hot IPOs have been oversubscribed by around four or five times.
Unlike almost every other US IPO I’ve heard of, UK retail investors have access. This is quite a big deal. Not all brokerages appear to have that optionality. Personally, I’ve applied for a small number of shares through Hargreaves Lansdown.
What are investors paying for?
SpaceX is essentially several businesses rolled into one.
The first part is Starlink. It’s a satellite internet service that generated $11.4bn in revenue in 2025 (61% of the company’s total) and $4.4bn in operating profit. Its 10.3m subscribers doubled year on year, and adjusted EBITDA grew 86%. Starlink is a real, fast-growing, highly profitable business.
The rest of the business is not so profitable. Starship development consumed $3bn in 2025, and the AI segment — built around the recently merged xAI — posted $6.35bn in operating losses last year and burned another $2.5bn in Q1 2026 alone.
The result? A GAAP net loss of $4.94bn for 2025 on $18.7bn in revenue (up 33% year on year).
SpaceX intends to use the proceeds to fund Starship development, expand Starlink’s satellite constellation, and scale its AI infrastructure.
It’s all part of Elon Musk’s grand plan. It’s phenomenally ambitious, but if Starship can continue to drastically decrease launch costs, and if space-based data centres really do work, then the business proposition could improve dramatically.
Is it worth the money?
At the IPO price, SpaceX is valued at roughly 95 times trailing revenue — comparable to what the market already pays for smaller space peers like Rocket Lab. SpaceX ($20bn forward revenue) and Rocket Lab ($850m) trade at roughly 70 times forward sales — forecasts suggest Rocket Lab won’t turn a profit until 2028 (when it’s trade at over 600 times earnings, although that first year of profitability isn’t always that telling).
Of course, it goes without saying that these are incredibly expensive numbers.
Forced buying
There’s also mechanical support on the way. S&P 500 inclusion is blocked for at least 12 months under current rules, but Nasdaq-100 inclusion could come as soon as 15 trading days post-IPO — likely late June.
That could trigger an estimated $15bn–$30bn in forced buying from index-tracking funds. This is demand that doesn’t care about the price. Understandably, some index investors aren’t thrilled about it. The combination of being immediately being one of the largest listed companies in the world, with a relatively small number of listed shares could make the impact very visible.
The bottom line
SpaceX isn’t my usual kind of investment. It’s not clearly undervalued. However, this is something quite extraordinary. Clearly, I think it’s worth considering, otherwise I wouldn’t have applied for shares myself, but it comes with significant caveats.
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