SpaceX as a Public Company

Executive Summary

For more than two decades, SpaceX was the investment that ordinary investors could not make. That changed on 12 June 2026, when the company listed on the Nasdaq under the ticker SPCX at US$135 per share — a US$1.77 trillion valuation and the largest initial public offering ever recorded. Within days the stock had surged past US$225, briefly making SpaceX more valuable than Amazon and Microsoft. Within two weeks it had fallen roughly 31% from that peak, back toward its offer price.

Our April 2026 note framed Elon Musk's companies as a single vertically integrated infrastructure stack — energy, robotics, launch, communications, and AI. That thesis has now been tested by the most unforgiving judge of all: a live public market. This note updates the SpaceX story specifically — what the company has become, what has gone right and wrong since April, and the central question every retail investor now faces: is SpaceX one of the great overvaluations of the modern market, or is the market simply early to recognising what it actually is?

1. From Private Legend to Public Stock: What Actually Happened

The April note anticipated a 2026 IPO. It arrived faster, larger, and stranger than almost anyone expected. The key facts:

• The offer: SpaceX priced its IPO at a fixed US$135 per share, raising approximately US$75–85 billion — more than triple the previous record. At the offer price the company was valued at roughly US$1.77 trillion, instantly one of the seven largest companies in the United States and larger than Tesla.
• The debut: shares opened around US$150 and closed the first session near US$161. Four days later the stock touched an intraday high of about US$225, briefly vaulting SpaceX past Amazon and Microsoft in market value.
• The correction: over the following two weeks the stock fell roughly 31% from its peak, trading back into the US$150s — still above the IPO price, but a brutal reminder of how violently a newly listed mega-cap can move.
• The structure: only about 4.2% of the company floated at IPO — the smallest free float of any mega-cap debut in US history — with a record ~30% of the offer allocated to retail investors. Elon Musk retains roughly 42% of the equity but about 85% of the voting power through super-voting shares. SpaceX is, formally, a "controlled company."

Two further post-IPO events matter. First, SpaceX raised US$25 billion in bonds — an offering that attracted roughly US$89 billion in demand and removed a 2027 bridge-loan refinancing risk that had been weighing on the shares. Second, the company announced a US$60 billion all-stock acquisition of AI coding platform Cursor, extending the AI build-out but diluting shareholders further. On 7 July, SpaceX joins the Nasdaq-100 index, triggering an estimated US$4+ billion of automatic index-fund buying.

2. What You Actually Own: Three Businesses in One Ticker

The February 2026 merger with xAI means that buying SPCX today is not buying "a rocket company." It is buying three very different businesses stapled together — with very different economics.

The group numbers reflect this mix: 2025 revenue of US$18.7 billion, adjusted EBITDA of about US$6.6 billion — but a net loss of US$4.9 billion for 2025, another US$4.3 billion net loss in the first quarter of 2026 alone, and free cash flow of roughly negative US$13.8 billion in 2025. The accumulated deficit exceeds US$41 billion. In plain terms: Starlink earns real money, launch dominates its market, and the AI segment currently consumes both.

3. What Has Changed Since April

The April note listed the pillars of the integrated-stack thesis. Here is an honest scorecard on how each has moved in the ten weeks since.

3a. The IPO: Delivered — and Then Some

The anticipated listing not only happened but exceeded the US$1.5 trillion valuation flagged in April. Public-market access is no longer a future catalyst; it is a live, tradeable reality — including for Australian investors through international share trading accounts. The catalyst has been spent. What remains is the harder task of growing into the price.

3b. AI Revenue: From Concept to Contracts

The most substantive positive development is that the orbital-AI and compute thesis has begun converting into signed revenue. Google has agreed to pay SpaceX approximately US$920 million per month from October 2026 through mid-2029 for access to roughly 110,000 GPUs at xAI data centres, and Anthropic has agreed to pay an estimated US$1.25 billion per month for computing power. These are the first hard numbers behind what was, in April, largely a story.

3c. Starship: Progress, But the Hard Part Remains Undone

Starship's first Version 3 test flight (Flight 12, May 2026) was a partial success: the upper stage deployed 22 Starlink simulators and completed most of its mission before a planned Indian Ocean splashdown, but the Super Heavy booster failed its boost-back burn and crash-landed offshore. Flight 13 is targeted for late July. The critical fact retail investors must hold onto is this: Starship has still never reached orbit or carried a real payload. Yet the company's own prospectus makes clear that next-generation Starlink, direct-to-mobile, and orbital AI compute all depend on it working.

3d. The Balance Sheet: Strengthened, at a Price

The US$25 billion bond raise removed near-term refinancing risk and was heavily oversubscribed — a genuine vote of institutional confidence. But layering US$25 billion of debt onto a company burning more than US$9 billion of free cash flow per quarter, immediately after an US$85 billion equity raise, underlines just how capital-hungry this build-out is.

4. The Valuation Question: Overvalued, or Simply Early?

This is the heart of the matter, and honest analysis requires presenting both cases fully — because the gap between them is wider than for almost any large company in market history.

4a. The Bear Case: The Numbers Do Not Work

By every conventional metric, SpaceX is extraordinarily expensive. At roughly US$2 trillion the company trades at around 100 times trailing revenue — a multiple normally reserved for tiny, hyper-growth software firms, not a capital-intensive industrial business losing nearly US$5 billion a year.

Independent valuers reach sobering conclusions. Morningstar's discounted cash flow analysis values SpaceX at about US$780 billion — roughly US$63 per share, less than half the IPO price — assigning around US$610 billion to the space and connectivity businesses and only US$170 billion to AI across probability-weighted scenarios. Valuation professor Aswath Damodaran arrives at roughly US$1.3 trillion, about 35% below the market price. CFRA initiated coverage with a Sell rating.

Bears also note the pattern. "Traditional valuation doesn't apply here" was precisely the argument made for Uber in 2019 and WeWork before its failed float. Some story stocks grow into their prices. Many do not. And history is unkind to mega-IPOs in their first six months: comparable debuts have routinely drawn down 30–50% as lockups expired.

4b. The Bull Case: The Category Error

Bulls argue the market is mis-filing SpaceX as an expensive "space stock" when it is actually three scarce assets in one. Falcon 9 is not competing in the launch market; for practical purposes it is the launch market, carrying over 80% of global mass to orbit. Starlink grew from one million subscribers in late 2022 to over ten million by early 2026, generates US$11 billion-plus a year at software-like margins, and is only beginning its direct-to-mobile expansion. No Western rival is close on either front.

On this reading, the AI losses are not waste but deliberate investment into contracted demand — the Google and Anthropic deals being early proof — and a discounted cash flow model built on today's cash burn systematically undervalues real options: orbital data centres, direct-to-device communications, lunar commerce. The bulls' conclusion: SpaceX at ~US$150 is not a bet on the 2026 income statement; it is a bet on owning the infrastructure of the 2030s, purchased before that is obvious to everyone.

5. Opportunities and Risks

SpaceX as a public stock offers retail investors genuine and historically unavailable exposure — alongside risks that are unusually concentrated for a company of this size.

Understanding the Key Near-Term Risks

• The lockup calendar is unusual — and front-loaded. Instead of the standard single 180-day lockup, pre-IPO holders may sell 20% of their shares once Q2 results are filed (expected late July/early August), a further 10% if the stock holds 30% above the IPO price for five of ten sessions afterwards, and additional 7% tranches at set intervals thereafter. Onto a 4.2% float, even modest insider selling is a flood. August is widely viewed as the highest-risk window on the calendar.
• The first earnings report is a genuine unknown. SpaceX has never reported as a public company. If Starlink growth or AI segment costs disappoint against expectations built during the IPO frenzy, the reaction could be severe — in either direction.
• Starship execution risk is existential to the growth story. The prospectus itself warns that any failure or delay in achieving Starship's launch cadence would materially affect the deployment of next-generation satellites, mobile connectivity, and orbital AI compute. Watch Flight 13 and the first orbital payload attempt in the second half of 2026.
• Competing supply of "story" stocks. Anthropic has filed confidentially for its own IPO and OpenAI is preparing to follow. Capital that chased SPCX as the only listed frontier-AI exposure will soon have alternatives.
• Derivative and leveraged products are proliferating. Leveraged SPCX ETFs and crypto-settled synthetic products have exploded in popularity. For a stock this volatile, leverage converts ordinary drawdowns into total losses. Retail investors should treat these instruments with extreme caution.

6. Implications for Your Portfolio

What does this mean for an Australian retail investor making decisions today? As with any early-stage public mega-cap, the honest answer separates by time horizon.

Long Term (2029 and Beyond)

If Starship achieves routine orbital reuse, the economics of everything above the Kármán line change — and SpaceX owns the tollgate. In that world, today's valuation may look conservative. That word "if" is carrying an extraordinary load.

If Starship stalls, SpaceX remains a very good business — a launch monopoly plus a satellite utility — worth, on independent estimates, roughly half or less of its current price. Long-term holders should be genuinely comfortable with that downside scenario, not merely aware of it.

Either way, position size is the discipline that lets you stay in the game long enough to find out. A holding sized so that a 50% drawdown is survivable is a holding you can keep through the volatility that this stock will certainly deliver.

7. Practical Steps for Investors

Conclusion: The Thesis Survived Contact — the Price Is Still on Trial

Step back from the daily price swings and consider what has actually been settled since our April note, and what has not.

What has been settled is significant. The integrated-stack thesis — that Musk's companies are converging into a single infrastructure platform spanning launch, communications, energy, and intelligence — is no longer an interpretive framework imposed by outside observers. It is now the company's own stated structure, written into a public prospectus, priced daily by the world's deepest capital market, and partially validated by contracted revenue: hyperscalers and frontier AI labs are paying SpaceX billions of dollars per year for compute, and Starlink has become one of the fastest-scaling subscription businesses ever built. The IPO itself — the largest in history, heavily oversubscribed, with a record retail allocation — confirmed that public markets accept the story as investable. None of that was guaranteed in April.

What has not been settled is whether the price is right — and here the evidence cuts against complacency. The market itself has already rendered a split verdict, marking the same company at US$2.6 trillion and then US$1.9 trillion within a fortnight. The most rigorous independent analyses — Morningstar's US$780 billion, Damodaran's US$1.3 trillion — do not dispute that SpaceX is exceptional; they dispute that exceptional is worth one hundred times revenue while the company loses five billion dollars a year and its pivotal technology has yet to reach orbit. The uncomfortable truth for bulls is that every element of the premium — orbital data centres, terabit satellites, direct-to-device at scale — runs through a single unproven vehicle. The uncomfortable truth for bears is that this company has made a habit of doing things that were confidently declared impossible, and now has US$110 billion of fresh capital with which to keep doing so.

For retail investors, we suggest the mature conclusion is this: SpaceX has graduated from a story you could only watch to a security you can actually own — and with that graduation comes the full discipline of public-market investing. The question is no longer "is this company extraordinary?" It plainly is. The question is "what am I paying for that extraordinariness, what has to go right to justify it, and what happens to my portfolio if it doesn't?" The next six months — first earnings, the lockup releases, and Starship's attempt to finally reach orbit — will supply more genuine information about this company than the last six years of private-market mythology.