Investing in SPCX: Is SpaceX Stock Worth the Price?
Investing · SPCX
Investing in SPCX: Is SpaceX Stock Worth the Price?
Investing in SPCX means buying rockets, Starlink, and an AI bet in one stock. Here's what the price actually assumes before you buy in.
On June 12, 2026, SpaceX rang the opening bell on the Nasdaq under the ticker SPCX. Shares priced at $135, valuing the company near $1.77 trillion, the largest IPO in history by a wide margin. A month later, the stock had round tripped from an intraday high of $225.64 back down below where it started.
That whiplash is the real backdrop for anyone researching investing in SPCX right now. This isn't a sleepy dividend stock you buy and forget about. It's a rocket company, a satellite internet provider, and an AI bet, all trading under one ticker, and Wall Street clearly hasn't agreed on what that combination is worth.
My take, up front: the underlying business is real, but the price already assumes the boldest version of the story comes true.
That makes SPCX worth watching closely and maybe worth owning in small doses. It's not a stock I'd back up the truck for at today's valuation.
The Business
Why Investing in SPCX Isn't Like Buying Boeing
SpaceX went public as three businesses stitched into one balance sheet, and each one runs on different economics.
Falcon 9, Falcon Heavy, and Starship, the launch business that made SpaceX famous, still booking contracts from NASA, the U.S. Space Force, and the National Reconnaissance Office.
Starlink, the satellite internet arm and the only segment that's actually profitable today.
xAI, folded into SpaceX through an all stock merger in February 2026, and the part of the business burning cash the fastest.
Starlink is the piece doing the heavy lifting financially. It brought in $11.4 billion in 2025, about 61 percent of total company revenue, up roughly 50 percent from $7.6 billion the year before. Its subscriber base topped 10.3 million by the end of March 2026, more than double the 4.6 million it had at the end of 2024. Total company revenue hit $18.67 billion for 2025, yet the company still posted a GAAP net loss of nearly $5 billion for the year, a sharp swing from the profit it reported in 2024, before the AI spending ramped up.
The Valuation
The Valuation Fight Wall Street Can't Settle
Nobody in the analyst community agrees on what SPCX is actually worth, and that split tells you most of what you need to know before buying in.
CFRA initiated coverage with a sell rating and a $115 price target, close to a 29 percent cut from where the stock closed at the time, pointing to the company's capital intensity and the sheer ambition built into its growth plan. NewStreet Research went the other way entirely, setting a $165 price target and arguing the real payoff shows up over a 20 to 25 year window, not next quarter. Morningstar landed somewhere else again, pegging fair value near $780 billion, less than half the IPO valuation, on the view that only Starlink has proven it can generate profit so far.
The prospectus itself leaned into the bull case hard, citing a total addressable market of $28.5 trillion, with roughly $25.6 trillion of that attributed to artificial intelligence through xAI. Ross Gerber of Gerber Kawasaki, an existing SpaceX shareholder, called the valuation alarming given the company had been worth $400 billion just thirteen months before the IPO. He chalked the jump up to confidence in Elon Musk personally, not conventional financial metrics.
The Volatility
Why the Stock Already Trades Like a Roller Coaster
SpaceX shares closed around $161 on debut day, already well above the $135 IPO price. From there, things got wilder. The stock hit that intraday high of $225.64 on June 16, pulled back to around $153 by late June, and by mid July had slipped below its original $135 IPO price for the first time.
Part of that swing traces back to Nasdaq fast tracking SpaceX into the Nasdaq 100 index, a rule change that forces index funds to buy shares on a set schedule regardless of price, and then amplifies moves once that forced buying tapers off. Part of it traces back to plain old spending. Capital expenditures hit $10.1 billion in the first quarter of 2026, versus $4.1 billion in the same quarter a year earlier, with most of that increase going toward AI infrastructure rather than rockets or satellites.
None of that makes SPCX a bad business. It makes it a volatile one, and volatility is exactly what you'd expect from a stock priced on a story that hasn't finished playing out yet.
How To Buy
How to Actually Own a Piece of This
Here's the part a lot of coverage skips. You don't need a special account or a pre IPO connection to buy SPCX now. It trades on the Nasdaq like any other public company, through whatever brokerage you already use.
That's a change from a few months ago. Musk had reportedly pushed to allocate up to 30 percent of IPO shares to retail investors, roughly three times the usual 5 to 10 percent reserved for individuals in a typical offering. Underwriters including Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, BofA Securities, Citigroup, and JPMorgan ran the deal on unusually thin fees, a sign of how badly Wall Street wanted this listing. If you want space exposure without the single stock concentration, Rocket Lab remains the closest public comparable, though it trades at a steeper price to sales multiple than SPCX does.
The Verdict
So, Should You Invest in SPCX?
Here's where I land. Starlink's growth is real, its margins are real, and the launch business has a lead over competitors that will take years for anyone to close. That part of the thesis holds up on its own.
The AI segment is the part I'm not ready to bet on yet. xAI is early, expensive, and unproven at the scale the stock price already assumes, and a $1.77 trillion valuation leaves very little room for that bet to disappoint. When your bear case analyst and your bull case analyst are $50 apart on price target, and Morningstar thinks fair value might be less than half the IPO price, that's not noise. That's a real disagreement about whether the growth story is worth what you're being asked to pay for it.
If I were adding SPCX to a portfolio today, I'd treat it as a small, high conviction position tied to the space and satellite story, not a core holding I'm counting on to behave like a normal stock. I'd also wait for at least one full earnings cycle as a public company before sizing up, since a month of trading tells you about sentiment, not fundamentals.
One more thing worth saying plainly. This is analysis of public information, not personalized financial advice, and SPCX has only been trading for a few weeks. Do your own math before you commit real money.
The stock has existed for barely a month. That's long enough to see how nervous the market already is about the price tag, not nearly long enough to know if the story behind it is true.
Comments
Post a Comment