FEATURED

SPCX at $162. Three Businesses, One Price.

The confetti has settled. The Nasdaq crowd has gone home. And SpaceX, which completed the largest initial public offering in recorded history on June 12, is now trading around $162 — down roughly 28% from its intraday all-time high of $225.64, reached just four days after listing.

Most people are reading this wrong.

The story right now is not that SPCX had a massive IPO. SpaceX priced 555,555,555 shares at $135 on June 11, raising approximately $75 billion at a valuation of $1.77 trillion — surpassing Saudi Aramco’s roughly $29 billion offering from 2019 to become the largest equity offering in history. That part everyone already knows. What the market hasn’t fully worked through is what you’re actually buying when you buy SPCX today.

Here’s where it gets interesting.

The investment case for SpaceX rests on three pillars: the Starlink satellite internet business, the Starship launch vehicle program, and the company’s AI infrastructure through its xAI acquisition. Three businesses. Three different economics. Three different timelines. And right now the market is putting one multiple on all of them.

Let’s start with the part that actually makes money today.

Starlink generated $11.4 billion in revenue in 2025 and $4.42 billion in operating profit, with an adjusted EBITDA margin of 63%. Its subscriber base grew from roughly 4.5 million to 10.3 million in a year, across 164 countries as of March 31, 2026. That is a real business — a fast-growing, high-margin telecommunications franchise that already rivals some of the best software companies on the planet by margin profile.

Then there’s xAI. This is the part that makes the valuation math uncomfortable.

The AI segment posted a $6.36 billion operating loss in 2025 on just $3.2 billion in revenue. In Q1 2026 alone, the AI division produced an operating loss of $2.47 billion and consumed $7.7 billion in capital expenditure — roughly 76% of everything SpaceX spent across the entire company that quarter. So Starlink is funding a cash-burning AI unit that is consuming the majority of the company’s capital. That is not a knock on the long-term vision. It is just context for where the risk actually lives inside SPCX today.

SpaceX only floated about 4% of its shares in the IPO. Index funds tracking the Nasdaq and MSCI indexes are required to buy SPCX proportional to its weighting — creating structural, price-insensitive buying pressure against a very thin float. That mechanical bid is real. It is not the same thing as fundamental value. But it is a legitimate reason why the stock may hold better than pure valuation math suggests near term.

The bear case has a number. Morningstar currently values SPCX at $62 per share — updated slightly from their $63 IPO-era estimate after SpaceX announced its $60 billion acquisition of AI coding platform Cursor. At $162, that puts the stock at roughly a 160% premium to Morningstar’s discounted cash flow model. Their analysts describe xAI as a material source of uncertainty with an “indeterminate” economic moat, and note the company’s valuation implies investors will need to wait decades for earnings to grow into current multiples.

The bull case also has a number. The Wall Street consensus 12-month price target sits at $204.14, with a Moderate Buy rating. The spread between $62 and $204 tells you everything about what kind of stock this actually is. SPCX is not a value stock. It is not even a growth stock in the traditional sense. It is a bet on a very specific version of the future.

SpaceX is scheduled to release its first publicly audited earnings report on August 6, 2026. That is the first real data point the market will get to stress-test the thesis against actual public company numbers. Watch xAI capex guidance and Starlink subscriber trajectory. Those two numbers will set the tone for the second half of the year.

There’s also a date worth circling in December. The 180-day insider lock-up expires then, at which point the 96% of shares currently locked up become eligible to trade. The thin float that helped push SPCX from $135 to $225 in three sessions could work in the other direction if that supply hits the market all at once.

The pullback from $225 to $162 is not a crisis. It is the market finding its footing on a genuinely unprecedented asset. The three-business model is real. The valuation gap between the bulls and the bears is unusually wide. August 6 closes some of that gap.

Until then, the float is thin, the passive bid is real, and nobody actually knows what xAI is worth. That combination makes this one of the more interesting situations in the market right now. Not necessarily cheap. But very far from boring.