The market is set to see two of the largest IPOs ever in 2026. Space Exploration Technologies (SPCX -1.02%) debuted in early June with a nearly $1.8 trillion market cap and raised over $85 billion in capital. Anthropic, meanwhile, plans to IPO this fall, looking to raise $100 billion at a $2 trillion market cap.
But which of their stocks will be the better one to own?
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SpaceX has been on a wild ride since its IPO, and the stock now sits about 5% above its $135 initial public offering price and about 4% below its first day opening price of $150. The stock is largely a bet on Elon Musk and the future, given the company's ambitious goals. At the time of its IPO, management pegged its total addressable market at a whopping $28.5 trillion, and Musk claimed the company would become worth more than Earth itself.
At the moment, the company's largest and most profitable business is its satellite internet service, Starlink. This business is growing quickly, adding subscribers and seeing strong revenue growth, including 66% in Q2 to $4.3 billion, while producing adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization (EBITDA) of $2.6 billion.
SpaceX has talked about taking on traditional wireless carriers with Starlink, but its limited spectrum, the technical challenges of using satellite broadband in densely populated areas, and the time and cost required to build a nationwide terrestrial network would likely mean it would need to acquire a mobile provider for this to happen.
The company's space segment is its smallest by revenue, but perhaps its most important. The company has demonstrated it can launch its reusable Falcon rockets regularly, but the key will be to do so with its massive new Starship rocket. If it can recover and quickly reuse these rockets, it would greatly improve the economics of putting payloads into orbit and open a world of possibilities for the company's space ambitions.
AI is ultimately the company's biggest opportunity, and this includes data centers in space. There are still technical challenges to overcome, but the company is currently working with Nvidia to address some of them. Meanwhile, SpaceX is seeing great cloud computing economics as it leases its compute, often at high prices to hyperscalers that need the extra capacity.
Image source: The Motley Fool.
Anthropic After a period of operating in the shadow of rival OpenAI, Anthropic burst into the spotlight as a leading model maker at the frontier. Instead of focusing on the consumer market, the company positioned itself as the leader in the enterprise and developer market with its long-term reasoning and coding agents.
Anthropic is particularly strong in developer-focused tool sets and agentic coding tools. This has enabled it to capture significant market share among enterprise customers that integrate its models via APIs. Its models are built on constitutional AI, resulting in more predictable AI behavior that appeals to regulated industries such as finance, healthcare, and law. Meanwhile, it uses a pay-per-token API pricing model to align its revenue closely with compute costs, enabling it to scale profitably.
The company has seen tremendous growth over the past year. In Q2, its revenue skyrocketed 14-fold year over year to $11.5 billion. Meanwhile, its annualized revenue run rate surged sevenfold to $65 billion at the end of July. It also turned in an operating profit, generating operating income of $559 million in the quarter. The company is really starting to separate itself from OpenAI, which generated $6.7 billion in Q2 revenue and had a $12.3 billion operating loss.
According to reports, Anthropic plans to cite a $30 trillion market opportunity in its prospectus, which seems like a number picked just to surpass the one given by SpaceX.
The verdict SpaceX already carries a pretty hefty valuation, and while Anthropic hasn't gone public yet, given the numbers being thrown around, it likely will too. Meanwhile, both will have market caps that place them among the largest companies in the world. As such, I'd view both as speculative investments despite their massive sizes.
If I had to pick one of these two stocks to add to my portfolio, I'd go with Anthropic, as it looks well ahead in the enterprise AI race. Meanwhile, the fact that it has achieved hyperbolic revenue growth while remaining profitable is impressive.
When investors think about CoreWeave's (CRWV -3.58%) biggest competitors, names like Amazon, Microsoft, Alphabet, and Nebius probably come to mind.
But one of the most interesting potential competitors doesn't look like a cloud company at all. It builds rockets. And yes, it's Space Exploration Technologies (SPCX -1.02%), also known as SpaceX.
That may sound strange. SpaceX is best known for rockets and Starlink, while CoreWeave provides cloud computing for artificial intelligence. But the lines between those businesses are beginning to blur.
SpaceX and its AI ecosystem are building enormous amounts of computing capacity, including massive Nvidia-powered data centers. And that capacity is increasingly being made available to outside customers.
For CoreWeave investors, this matters for a reason that goes beyond losing a few customers -- SpaceX could help change the economics of AI computing itself.
Image source: Getty Images.
CoreWeave is essentially selling computing power The easiest way to understand CoreWeave is to think of it as a utility for AI.
Companies building advanced AI models need enormous amounts of computing power. Instead of spending billions of dollars building everything themselves, they can rent access to specialized infrastructure from providers such as CoreWeave.
CoreWeave supplies the GPUs, data centers, networking, storage, and software needed to make that computing power available. The business has benefited from a powerful trend: AI demand has grown extremely quickly, while new computing capacity takes time and enormous amounts of money to build.
That imbalance has been good for CoreWeave. For perspective, the tech company grew revenue by 112% in the latest quarter to $2.6 billion while revenue backlog surged 246% to $104 billion.
But it also creates an important question for long-term investors: What happens when the supply of AI computing catches up with demand? That's where SpaceX becomes interesting.
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The rocket company is building an AI empire SpaceX's connection to AI comes largely through xAI and its massive Colossus computing facilities. These data centers have been built to support the enormous computing requirements of AI models and deploy hundreds of thousands of Nvidia GPUs.
But the infrastructure isn't necessarily limited to internal use. SpaceX has also signed agreements to provide computing capacity to outside companies, including major AI players. For perspective, SpaceX announced that it contracted $14.1 billion in computing power to external customers in the latest quarter.
That changes the story. SpaceX isn't simply building computers to support an AI company. It is increasingly becoming part of the AI computing market. And unlike a typical start-up entering the industry, SpaceX brings an unusual collection of advantages.
SpaceX has something most competitors don't CoreWeave's biggest advantage is specialization. It has focused primarily on AI infrastructure.
SpaceX has a completely different advantage: scale and engineering capability. Building AI infrastructure requires far more than buying Nvidia GPUs. It requires enormous amounts of electricity, suitable land, data centers, cooling systems, networking equipment, and the ability to bring all of it online quickly.
SpaceX has spent years building extremely complex physical infrastructure in industries where failure is not an option. That doesn't automatically make it a better AI cloud provider. But it gives the company an unusual ability to tackle the physical constraints that limit AI computing.
And that could become increasingly important as the industry expands.
CoreWeave still has a powerful weapon None of this means CoreWeave's investment thesis is broken. In fact, the company has an advantage that's difficult for newcomers to replicate: experience.
Running a massive GPU cluster isn't simply about owning GPUs. Customers need reliable performance, fast deployment, efficient scheduling, high utilization, and software that makes thousands of GPUs work together effectively.
CoreWeave has been building that expertise for years. Its specialization also allows it to focus entirely on AI infrastructure rather than balancing the business against rockets, satellites, or other priorities. Besides, it has developed relationships with major AI customers, positioning it well to expand with these customers.
So the competition may ultimately come down to two very different strengths. SpaceX has scale and engineering firepower. CoreWeave has specialization and AI-cloud expertise.
What CoreWeave investors should watch This is why four things deserve close attention over the next several years.
The first is pricing. If CoreWeave can maintain attractive pricing as computing supply increases, that's a sign its platform remains differentiated.
The second is GPU utilization. Expensive GPUs only create value when customers are actually using them.
The third is capital efficiency. CoreWeave is spending enormous amounts of money to expand. Investors need to see those investments producing increasingly attractive returns.
And finally, watch customer diversification. A broader customer base would reduce CoreWeave's dependence on a small number of enormous AI customers and strengthen its bargaining position.
If CoreWeave delivers on these four areas, it may signal that the company has built a defensive position against large tech giants like SpaceX and, to an extent, incumbents like Amazon and Alphabet.
Historically, September has been one of the toughest months for the S&P 500 (^GSPC -0.78%). This year, September could be a particularly volatile month for Space Exploration Technology (SPCX -0.22%), as the stock price fights to stay above its $135 initial public offering pricing.
This month, there are three challenges SpaceX stock will face. If it can get through it, the stock's longer-term outlook looks brighter. Here are the three challenges and the potential.
Image source: Getty Images.
1. Negative returns in September The first challenge for the SpaceX stock price is that September is just a historically tough time for the broader markets. From 1928 through 2023, the S&P 500 has averaged a negative return during September (down 1.17%). Looking more recently, from 2022 to 2025, the S&P 500 has been profitable only 50% of the time, essentially a coin flip:
September 2022: -9.3% September 2023: -4.8% September 2024: +2% September 2025: +3.5% And the average return for September from those four years is negative 2.1%. That's not to say it's a guarantee that SpaceX stock will end September down, but history suggests it's a volatile time, and shareholders should be prepared for price swings.
2. Interest rate increase likely The second challenge the SpaceX stock price may face is the growing likelihood of an interest rate hike in September. As of Aug. 28, the chance of a rate hike was 57%, according to the CME Group's FedWatch Tool.
Rate hikes can hit tech stocks hard, as investors may rotate out of what are perceived as riskier stocks in favor of more income-generating assets that benefit from the hikes. With higher rates, investors may also worry about higher borrowing costs for companies and an economic slowdown, which could prompt share sales.
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3. More insider shares will unlock SpaceX IPO'd earlier this year, but only a portion of its shares were made publicly available. Rules were put in place to allow insiders to sell their shares at staggered time intervals following the IPO to better control potential share price volatility. More than 700 million shares (about 5.3% of all shares) will be unlocked and available for sale in September. An additional 650 million shares (4.9%) will unlock in October.
Shares were already unlocked in August, which has so far had minimal impact on the SpaceX stock price. If anything, the stock price actually climbed the day following the unlocking periods. Still, shares flooding the market always create the potential for the stock price to sink lower.
Looking beyond this September to 2027 Seasonality can help with mental preparation, setting the expectation that prices could experience noticeable swings in September. That said, one month alone won't determine the full upside potential of SpaceX's stock price. And while there are several challenges in September, analysts are typically bullish on where SpaceX could trade by September 2027.
Per CNN, of the 40 analysts who rate SpaceX stock, 75% rate it a buy, 18% a hold, and 8% a sell. From that group of analysts, the median one-year price target is $217. The highest price target is $800, while the lowest is $75. But even from the Aug. 28 closing price of $141.50, reaching the median target of $217 would represent a 53.3% gain.
To put that in dollar terms, if someone bought $10,000 worth of SpaceX stock at the Aug. 28 closing price of $141.50, that would give them approximately 70 shares. If the stock price reaches $217 per share, that $10,000 would then be worth around $15,335.
So while September may be a rocky month, a falling stock price could present a buying opportunity for more aggressive, long-term investors who have high conviction in SpaceX.
Space Exploration Technologies Corp. (NASDAQ:SPCX) has built rockets by controlling more of the manufacturing process than traditional aerospace companies.
Now Elon Musk is applying the same playbook to AI’s biggest physical bottleneck: electricity, with SpaceX developing its own gas turbine component manufacturing in Texas to avoid a power equipment supply chain that has been stretched for years.
SpaceX’s Power PlaySpaceX is laying the groundwork for a foundry in Bastrop, Texas, to produce the blades and vanes used in large gas turbines, The Information reported. SpaceX has been hiring engineers for the facility, including roles tied to materials, automation, tooling and the construction of a new manufacturing line.
Musk subsequently confirmed the strategy on X, saying natural gas will still be needed to “supplement and bootstrap solar for several years.” He said bringing blade and vane casting in-house could accelerate gas turbines coming online by as much as 18 months, calling the result a “profound game-changer.”
The reason SpaceX is going this far is simple: AI data centers need enormous amounts of reliable power, and waiting for new grid connections can take too long.
AI’s Power BottleneckThe hardest part may not be generating electricity itself, but getting the equipment needed to generate it.
The Information reported that only a handful of companies can produce the highly specialized turbine blades required for industrial-scale gas turbines, with those foundries already operating near capacity. GE Vernova Inc‘s (NYSE:GEV) turbine business, for example, has seen orders extending into 2030.
The blades operate at temperatures of roughly 3,000 to 3,600 degrees Fahrenheit and require sophisticated casting techniques, making the manufacturing process difficult to replicate quickly, TechCrunch reported.
For SpaceX, that makes vertical integration more than a manufacturing preference. It becomes a way to remove a bottleneck standing between an AI facility and the computing power it needs.
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From Rockets to AI InfrastructureThe bigger shift is where SpaceX is applying that philosophy.
The company is developing Terafab, an ambitious semiconductor manufacturing project in Texas, while also expanding its AI infrastructure. The turbine effort effectively connects those ambitions: SpaceX wants to produce AI hardware, but it also needs sufficient electricity to power the infrastructure that supports it.
That is an unusually broad form of vertical integration. SpaceX isn’t simply buying GPUs or leasing data-center capacity; it is increasingly trying to control the physical systems around the compute, from manufacturing to power.
The most important signal is not that SpaceX is entering the turbine business. It is that AI demand is pushing even technology companies into traditionally industrial businesses.
As power becomes as important as chips in determining how quickly AI infrastructure can scale, companies that control constrained physical inputs could gain an advantage that software alone cannot provide.
Space Exploration Technologies Corp (NASDAQ:SPCX) shares closed out August on a tear, up 32% from the month’s lows and reclaiming ground lost since the rocket-and-AI company’s rocky post-IPO summer.
SPCX stock is moving. See the real-time price action here. SpaceX stock ended August at $143.49, up from lows near $108 in early August, according to Benzinga Pro data. The rally added back an estimated $450-$500 billion in market value, though the stock remains roughly $1 trillion below its $2.9 trillion peak hit June 16, just days after its record-setting $75 billion IPO.
The turnaround traces to Aug. 6, when SpaceX’s first post-IPO lock-up expiry freed roughly 911 million shares — about 7% of shares outstanding — for trading, a moment that had investors concerned about a downturn.
Rather than triggering a sell-off, the stock soared 35% in five sessions, adding roughly $500 billion in market cap.
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Earnings Beat, AI JittersSpaceX second-quarter earnings release on Aug. 4 gave the rally a boost despite an initial after-hours stumble: revenue jumped 92% year-over-year to $7.81 billion, beating estimates, even as investors fretted over AI-segment spending.
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Argus Research upgraded shares to Buy from Hold on Aug. 7 with a $160 price target, saying not to “bet against Musk,” per CNBC.
NVIDIA Corp.‘s (NASDAQ:NVDA) disclosure of a 122.8 million-share, roughly $21 billion stake in SpaceX added another leg to the story, lending AI-infrastructure credibility to the rally. Alphabet Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOGL) (NASDAQ:GOOG), Harvard University and Advanced Micro Devices (NASDAQ:AMD) also disclosed large stakes.
Morgan Stanley reiterated an overweight rating and $300 price target on Aug. 26, tied to SpaceX’s $100 billion Louisiana spaceport plan, with analyst Adam Jonas writing that “the implied valuation for SpaceX’s AI business at the current price is, in our opinion, extremely conservative.”
Not everyone’s convinced the rally has legs. SPCX trades at roughly 66 times sales — a steep multiple even for a company growing revenue near triple digits.
What’s Next: More Unlocks AheadWall Street’s average price target sits near $226, implying more upside — but after a month this volatile, traders are bracing for the next lock-up test in September.
More share unlocks are already on the calendar: roughly 319 million additional shares became eligible for trading on Aug. 20, with another 700 million or so slated for release each month through October.
How SPCX absorbs that fresh supply may determine whether August’s comeback turns into a durable trend or just another swing in a stock that’s already lived several lifetimes since its June debut.
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This content was partially produced with the help of AI tools and was reviewed and published by Benzinga editors.
SpaceX is now publicly traded and sitting just outside the reach of the world's largest ETF, and the rulebook keeping it out raises real questions about what VOO holders should do while they wait.
This post may contain links from our sponsors and affiliates, and Flywheel Publishing may receive compensation for actions taken through them.
Vanguard’s S&P 500 ETF (NYSEARCA:VOO) crossed $1 trillion in assets earlier this year, the first ETF ever to do so. None of that capital can own SpaceX today, and won’t be able to for many more months.
The reason is a rulebook. VOO tracks the S&P 500, and that index is overseen by a committee at S&P Dow Jones Indices that decides which US companies qualify.
SpaceX began trading on June 12, 2026, and now sits outside every mainstream index fund by design. VOO holders have zero exposure despite the fund’s scale.
The question is whether that gap matters, and if so, what to do. The delay likely protects VOO holders, though the mechanics deserve scrutiny.
Rulebook Keeping SpaceX Out of the Index The S&P 500 uses hard eligibility gates. A candidate must trade publicly for at least 12 months, report a GAAP profit in its latest quarter and across the previous four quarters combined.
It also needs at least 10% of its shares available to public investors. A committee then decides at its discretion among eligible names.
S&P consulted the industry on relaxing those thresholds for enormous new listings and ultimately refused to change them, so the gate stays where it is even for a name of SpaceX’s scale.
Because SpaceX started trading in June, it cannot become eligible before June 2027. That is the earliest possible date.
Even then, admission is discretionary. VOO owns the same holdings as the index, so the fund cannot front-run the committee.
Where SpaceX Fails Two of Three Tests Seasoning resolves with time. Profitability and float are structural, and both currently disqualify SpaceX.
The company reported a $4.94 billion net loss in 2025. That figure alone bars inclusion under the current earnings test.
The float problem is thornier. Roughly 3% to 4% of its equity was publicly available at the IPO, well under the 10% minimum.
Elon Musk controls a large block, and existing investors sold sparingly. Unless secondary offerings expand the float, the hurdle stays regardless of earnings.
Both problems are fixable, although neither will be resolved on the market’s timetable, which is why 2027 is the earliest realistic timeline for conversation.
What VOO Holders Should Actually Do One option is to buy SpaceX directly and treat it as a satellite around a VOO core. That accepts single-stock risk on a company trading near a multitrillion valuation on roughly $18 billion in trailing sales.
A second option is a rules-lighter index fund. Some total-market and growth ETFs admit new names faster than the S&P 500 committee does, though most still require reasonable float.
The third is patience. VOO owns the eligible US large-cap market cheaply at a 0.03% expense ratio while returning about 20% over the past year and 83% over five years.
Reddit sentiment on VOO has drifted toward bearish readings amid low activity, and one active thread asks where the next trillion-dollar company will come from. Fair question, though VOO is built to answer it late.
For most long-term index holders, staying put and sizing any SpaceX exposure separately is consistent with how VOO is designed to work.
Why the Delay Is Worth Owning The rules exist because index funds are default portfolios for millions of Americans, and defaults should be conservative. Profitability, float, and seasoning filter out companies that have yet to prove they belong in a trillion-dollar vehicle.
Relaxing thresholds for SpaceX would create precedent for every large private company that lists next. The committee’s refusal preserves the index’s meaning.
VOO holders effectively hire that committee to enforce discipline they might not enforce on their own, which is part of what makes a default portfolio a default in the first place.
When SpaceX earns its way in, VOO will hold it at whatever float-adjusted weight the methodology assigns. That weight will represent a small slice of the fund, and it may start modest.
Owning SpaceX through VOO in 2028 at a methodology-assigned weight is a cleaner outcome for a core index holder than reaching for it today at any weight, because the position will reflect the same discipline that governs every other name in the fund.
Contact [email protected] for any questions or corrections.
Shares of Redwire (RDW -3.41%), a producer of critical space mission components, closed at a record high of $25.90 on May 28 as the market's anticipation for SpaceX's (SPCX -0.24%) IPO sparked a buying frenzy in space stocks. However, Redwire and many of its industry peers lost their momentum ahead of SpaceX's market debut on June 12 -- and that record-setting IPO exacerbated that pressure by drawing investors away from smaller space stocks.
By July 29, Redwire's stock had sunk to a 52-week low of $7.78. But today, it trades at about $10, so a $1,000 investment at its 2026 low would have grown to nearly $1,300.
Image source: Getty Images.
Does Redwire have more upside potential? Redwire develops navigation, power, and 3D-printing components for satellites, space stations, and other spacecraft. It also manufactures military drones and custom components for missile defense and military communications systems.
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Before going public, Redwire predicted its revenue could rise from $163 million in 2021 to $1.41 billion in 2025. But in reality, its revenue only rose from $138 million in 2021 to $335 million in 2025. It struggled with negative cost revisions on its fixed-price contracts, delayed government deals, and expensive acquisitions that diluted its investors and squeezed its margins.
Redwire disappointed many investors, but analysts expect its revenue to grow at a 27% 3-year CAGR to $684 million in 2028 as its customers build orbital data centers, launch more satellites, develop new drones, and launch new lunar missions. At five times next year's sales, Redwire also looks cheaper than SpaceX, which trades at 19 times next year's sales.
Leo Sun has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.
Space Exploration Technologies (SPCX -0.24%) generated $7.8 billion of revenue in the second quarter. It also racked up $18.4 billion in capital expenditures.
For investors, that immediately raises an uncomfortable question: Is SpaceX spending too much?
It's a fair question. But looking at those $18.4 billion in outlays in isolation misses the bigger picture. SpaceX isn't spending that money simply to maintain its current business. It's spending aggressively to build the businesses it hopes will power the company for the next decade.
Image source: Getty Images.
What is SpaceX spending on? First, let's put the number into context. Those $18.4 billion were its quarterly capital expenditures -- money it used to build long-term infrastructure and assets rather than to pay for ordinary operating expenses. And the overwhelming majority went toward one area: artificial intelligence.
SpaceX spent approximately $15.8 billion on AI-related infrastructure during the quarter, ending the quarter with roughly 1.4 gigawatts of computing capacity, up from about 400 megawatts a year earlier. The company is also investing heavily in its Starlink satellite network, its launch infrastructure, and Starship, its next-generation rocket.
In other words, SpaceX is building new capacity far faster than most companies of its size. That's important to dissect because capital expenditures aren't inherently good or bad. What matters is what that capital eventually produces. If $1 billion of investment produces several billion dollars of additional cash flow, the spending was worthwhile. If it produces little incremental profit, it wasn't. And that brings us to the obvious question.
Why is SpaceX spending so much?
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In pursuit of opportunity The short answer is to meet massive demand.
AI companies need enormous amounts of computing power, and demand for it has exploded. To put it into perspective, SpaceX's AI-related revenue reached $2.6 billion in the second quarter, up 247% year over year.
That's extraordinary growth. Better still, management believes the opportunity is attractive enough to justify building compute capacity aggressively -- SpaceX's CFO has said that some new AI compute deployments could have payback periods of less than a year because demand currently exceeds available supply.
If that proves sustainable, the economics could be extremely attractive. Imagine spending $1 billion on infrastructure that generates so much cash that you recoup that investment in less than a year. You'd want to keep building. That's essentially the logic behind SpaceX's spending spree.
But there's an important caveat. Today's AI economics may not last forever. Data center infrastructure is attracting enormous amounts of capital from Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet, Meta Platforms, and specialized cloud providers like CoreWeave. As more compute capacity comes online, the shortage could eventually disappear. Pricing could fall, utilization could decline, or payback periods could lengthen.
That's why investors shouldn't simply extrapolate 247% AI revenue growth into the future. The real question is whether SpaceX can continue earning attractive returns as it scales up its AI infrastructure business.
Can SpaceX afford it? For now, the answer appears to be yes. SpaceX ended the quarter with $100 billion of cash and marketable securities on its books, after raising about $86 billion from its IPO and $25 billion from a bond sale. So it has an enormous financial cushion.
More importantly, it isn't entirely dependent on outside capital to fund its ambitions. Starlink, its satellite-internet business, is already generating substantial profits. The connectivity business produced approximately $1.7 billion of operating income in the second quarter on $4.3 billion of revenue.
That's important. SpaceX has built a business that generates recurring revenue and meaningful operating profits while simultaneously creating new businesses that could become much larger over time.
What does it mean for investors? Overall, I think investors should take the $18.4 billion in quarterly capex seriously -- without necessarily being alarmed by it. Spending on that scale tells us something important about SpaceX: This is going to be a highly capital-intensive company for years to come.
That's both its opportunity and its risk. If it can turn its AI investments into high-return infrastructure, today's spending could create enormous shareholder value for SpaceX investors.
But there's another possibility. SpaceX could keep finding "exciting opportunities" that require billions of dollars of investment without generating equally attractive returns, which would be a very different story. And given that it trades at a market cap of roughly $1.9 trillion and a price-to-sales ratio of about 65, investors don't have the luxury of accepting mediocre returns indefinitely.
Ultimately, investors must decide whether they have confidence in the management's ability to deliver.
Key Takeaways SpaceX shares recovered to around $144 after falling from a $225.64 post-IPO intraday high.Starlink revenues rose 66% to $4.29B in Q2, while operating income climbed 79.4% to $1.66B.Starship's 14th flight, targeting the vehicle's first orbital attempt, is expected in mid-September. About two and a half months after SpaceX (SPCX - Free Report) went public on Nasdaq, the stock has taken investors on a wild ride. Shares were priced at $135 in the IPO and opened at $150. They quickly surged to an intraday high of $225.64 within a couple of days before losing much of those gains. The stock fell to $104.83 in early August but has since recovered to around $144.
That kind of volatility is not unusual for a high-profile IPO. The question is whether the decline reflects weakness in SpaceX’s business or simply a reset in investor expectations. So far, the company’s operating results suggest the latter.
SPCX Stock Takes Initial Hit Despite Q2 BeatSpaceX delivered a solid second quarter, with revenues coming in more than 16% above the Zacks Consensus Estimate. Loss per share also came in narrower than expected.
Starlink, reported under the company’s connectivity segment, was a major contributor. Revenues reached $4.29 billion, up 66% year over year. The company’s newer AI segment also performed better than expected, generating $2.56 billion, jumping 247.5% year over year. Space revenues increased 29% year over year to $962 million.
While the stock declined over 13% the next day, the reaction was mostly about capital expenditures ($18.4 billion for the quarter, well above Wall Street expectations) rather than any weakness in the business itself. The stock has since recovered most of that drop and seems to be getting back on track.
Starlink Is Doing the Heavy LiftingStarlink is still the most important part of the SpaceX investment story. The satellite broadband business now serves customers in more than 160 countries and has developed into a profitable business. That gives SpaceX an advantage that many other high-growth companies do not have. Starlink can generate cash while SpaceX continues investing in businesses that may take years to reach their full potential.
Starlink reached 12.0 million subscribers as of June 30, 2026, up from 6 million a year earlier and the segment’s operating income rose 79.4% to $1.66 billion.
On the last earnings call, management highlighted that V3 satellites are expected to provide ten times the broadband capacity of current generations. That would support higher-value service tiers and further subscriber growth as deployment scales.
Starship and the AI Pivot Are the Real Upside CaseStarlink pays the bills, but Starship is where the bigger prize sits. If SpaceX can get its fully reusable next-generation rocket flying reliably at scale, it could significantly reduce the cost of putting payloads into orbit. That could create demand for new types of space missions and strengthen SpaceX’s already dominant position in the launch market.
In July, Starship's 13th test flight achieved several notable firsts, and the 14th launch— which would be Starship's first attempt at reaching orbit— is targeted for mid-September, though SpaceX's launch dates have a history of slipping.
On top of that, the company has been building out a third leg — AI infrastructure. Multi-year computing agreements with major cloud and AI customers are already generating real revenues, and the acquisition of Cursor-maker Anysphere would deepen SpaceX's footprint in enterprise software.
AI revenues jumped 247.5% year over year to $2.56 billion in the last reported quarter. Top-line growth is being driven by lucrative contracts from AI giants Alphabet (GOOGL - Free Report) and Anthropic. Compute revenues reached $2.6 billion (+247% YoY). The segment posted adjusted EBITDA of $1.15 billion in the last reported quarter, reversing from a $276 million loss a year ago. Management expects compute capacity to exceed 2 gigawatts by year-end and 10 gigawatts by 2027 end.
What Does SpaceX’s Valuation Say?At roughly 22 times forward sales, SPCX stock certainly looks expensive by traditional metrics, even among high-growth tech peers. But judging SpaceX purely on current numbers risks repeating the mistake investors made with Tesla (TSLA - Free Report) for years, dismissing it as overvalued while underestimating its execution and innovation.
Image Source: Zacks Investment Research
Our TakeA self-funding cash cow in Starlink, a potential monopoly opportunity in Starship, and a fast-growing AI infrastructure business— and SpaceX’s pullback from the IPO's euphoric highs looks less like a warning sign and more like an entry point. The business fundamentals have actually strengthened since the debut, even as the stock price cooled off.
SPCX currently carries a Zacks Rank #2 (Buy), reflecting improving earnings estimates and a business trending in the right direction. You can see the complete list of today’s Zacks #1 Rank (Strong Buy) stocks here.
Image Source: Zacks Investment Research
Wall Street's average price target implies roughly 54% upside from current levels.
Image Source: Zacks Investment Research
For investors who missed the IPO pop and have been waiting for a better price, this looks like a reasonable place to start building a position.
Cathie Wood-led ARK Invest‘s Chief Futurist Brett Winton has weighed in on why Elon Musk and Space Exploration Technologies Corp. (NASDAQ:SPCX) are heavily investing in building a second Starbase spaceport in Louisiana.
Starbase Will Feature Multiple Starship TowersAccording to an investor note released by ARK on Monday, Winton said that the Starbase in Louisiana was a $100 billion commitment spanning roughly 125,000 acres at Pecan Island in Vermilion Parish and will feature five complexes, each equipped with two Starship towers.
It will start with ten launch pads and eventually expand to over a dozen towers supporting around 30 flights per day, Winton said, touting on-site propellant production, power generation, deep-water shipping, vehicle processing, employee housing, and likely an airport.
He also pointed to SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell, who said that SpaceX’s current capacity cannot accommodate Starship’s intended launch cadence.
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ARK Invest anticipates this capacity will serve payloads worth trillions of dollars annually, starting with billions for Starlink and trillions for the Starmind AI constellation. Per ARK’s estimates, a single reusable Starlink-loaded Starship flight could generate about $4 billion in lifetime net cash flow against $1 billion in launch, satellite manufacturing, ground station, and acquisition costs, he wrote in the investor note.
An Opportunity Larger Than ARK Can ModelTaking to X on Monday, Winton expanded upon the note as he quoted an earlier post he made that detailed Starbase’s cost coming in just behind Gov. Gavin Newsom‘s (D-CA) California High Speed Rail Project, but it was for a reason. “We think this [Starlink] opportunity scales into the hundreds of billions of dollars before returns begin to decay,” Winton said in the post.
He added that the commercial space flight company was “going after a larger connectivity opportunity than we currently mode,” outlining SpaceX’s claimed $1.6 trillion opportunity compared to ARK’s $600 billion figure.
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“Starbase Louisiana is massively overbuilt for just serving connectivity,” he said. “The reason to build so big: the AI opportunity can compound at much larger scale,” Winton added.
“We think cost per GW on earth moves north of $60b per GW in 2029 and crosses $76b in 2032,” he said, talking about terrestrial data center costs per Gigawatt and how SpaceX’s AI satellites could weigh 2,000 kg each, while citing Starlink’s per-satellite cost of $1000/kg.
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“We also know that cost of launch will fall to something south of $100 per kg all-in if they can make Starship reuseable,” he said. He added that this could translate to SpaceX launching satellites for $38 billion per GW.
In the same thread, he outlined that “after the 100th launch of its AI satellites,” SpaceX will have brought the costs down to $32 billion per GW. “SpaceX should enjoy an undeniable cost advantage over every other player,” he said, but warned monetization could become a challenge.
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Price Action: SPCX shares fell 0.91% to $143.29 during pre-market trading on Tuesday.
Disclaimer: This content was partially produced with the help of AI tools and was reviewed and published by a Benzinga editor.
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Check out more of Benzinga’s Future Of Mobility coverage by following this link.
August brought a bullish reversal for SpaceX (NASDAQ: SPCX) stock, though it, despite leaving the equity above the initial public offering (IPO) price of $135, failed to take it above either the day-one open or close.
SpaceX stock price one-month chart. Source: Google Under the circumstances, Finbold consulted some of the leading artificial intelligence (AI) platforms regarding whether SPCX shares will achieve a bullish breakout by September 30, 2026, or if stagnation – or even a return to the downtrend – is in the cards.
Three top AI platforms set SpaceX stock price target for September 30 To begin with, Anthropic’s Claude AI came out as rather confident that the SpaceX stock price rally will continue in September, albeit slowly.
Indeed, according to the platform, Elon Musk’s newer public company has the potential for a strong rally thanks to the planned Starship launches but also faces a macro risk from the coming FED interest rate decision.
Under the circumstances, Claude decided that the equity is likely to keep climbing but is not yet ready ‘to sprint,’ and that it will therefore end the month at $157: 9.26% above the August close at $143.69.
Claude AI SpaceX stock price target for September 30, 2026. Source: Finbold & Claude Elsewhere, ChatGPT proved only slightly less optimistic. According to OpenAI’s flagship platform, SpaceX stock has strong upside potential provided the Starship and the AI infrastructure strategy work, but it remains unlikely that a single month will provide sufficient time for a larger re-pricing.
Thus, ChatGPT set its September 30, 2026, SPCX price target at $155, 7.87% higher than the latest close.
ChatGPT AI SpaceX stock price target for September 30, 2026. Source: Finbold & ChatGPT Finally, Google’s (NASDAQ: GOOGL) AI platform, Gemini, came in with a very similar set of catalysts for SpaceX in the short-term and a very similar forecast: $155.
Still, the model also noted that a breakout above $150 could lead to a quicker rally – its bull case estimates a rise to $172 is possible – but also estimated that the insider lockup schedule remains a structural risk.
Indeed, Gemini explained that, should insider selling begin in earnest, it could lead to an 8.14% drop to $132 by September 30, 2026.
Gemini AI SpaceX stock price target for September 30, 2026. Source: Finbold & Gemini Thus, the average AI SpaceX stock price target for the end of the month amounts to $156.67 – 9.03% above the August close and 10.41% above the September 1 pre-market price of $141.90.
SpaceX stock to remain in the red by September 30, 2026 Meanwhile, it would appear that, despite all three platforms seemingly concurring with the bullish long-term forecasts, SPCX shares remain unlikely to produce profits for the vast majority of investors.
SpaceX stock price all-time chart. Source: Google Specifically, the individual price targets as well as the average fall within the intraday prices recorded on June 12 – SpaceX’s first day after launching to the public markets – meaning that the all-time losses relative to the first-ever close will diminish from 10.72%, but remain as high as 2.66%.
The S&P 500 (^GSPC -0.33%) is hovering near a record high, but the large-cap index's lofty valuation could limit its upside potential from here. It currently has a Shiller Cyclically Adjusted Price-to-Earnings (CAPE) ratio of 41.8. That makes this the second-most-expensive market in history, behind only the peak of the dot-com bubble in 1999 and 2000.
A number of catalysts could derail this euphoric bull market, including the conflicts in the Middle East, high inflation, Federal Reserve interest rate hikes, and the midterm Congressional elections in November. Therefore, this might be a good time for investors to take some money off the table.
Stocks with high valuations tend to be the most vulnerable to sharp corrections when there is turmoil in the broader market, because investors start to question whether the underlying companies can grow as quickly as optimists had previously hoped they would. I've identified two stocks trading at sky-high valuations that might be worth selling if the S&P 500 starts to head lower.
Image source: Getty Images.
The first stock to sell: SpaceX Space Exploration Technologies (SPCX +1.55%) was founded by Elon Musk in 2002, with an initial goal to reduce the costs of launching payloads into space. It continues to make significant progress on that front, and it has also built highly lucrative satellite internet connectivity and artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure businesses.
SpaceX uses its Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy reusable rockets to blast around 2,500 tons of payloads into orbit each year on behalf of businesses and government agencies. The company's new Starship rocket, which has a significantly greater capacity than the Falcon series, is expected to enter commercial service next year.
SpaceX has also used its rockets to launch more than 10,000 of its own Starlink satellites into orbit, where they currently provide internet access to 12 million paying customers here on Earth. This business accounts for most of the company's revenue right now, and management estimates that satellite connectivity could be a $1.6 trillion addressable market.
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However, SpaceX's most valuable opportunity might be in AI, where management has identified $26.5 trillion worth of opportunities across infrastructure, consumer subscriptions, and enterprise applications. This is currently the company's fastest-growing business, and it could overtake the satellite connectivity segment in terms of revenue by the end of 2026.
In fact, Chief Financial Officer Bret Johnsen thinks the AI business could achieve an annual revenue run rate of $100 billion by the end of the year as AI developers like Anthropic, Alphabet, and Reflection AI line up to rent computing capacity from SpaceX's state-of-the-art data centers.
But here's the rub for investors. SpaceX generated $23 billion in total revenue over the last four quarters, and based on its market capitalization of $1.92 trillion (as of the market close on Friday, Aug. 28), its stock has a price-to-sales (P/S) ratio of 83. It's a whopping 13 times as expensive as the Nasdaq-100 technology index, which has a P/S ratio of just 6.2.
Even if we assume SpaceX's total revenue will grow to $105 billion in 2027 like Wall Street expects (according to Yahoo! Finance), its forward P/S ratio is still 18. Therefore, although SpaceX stock is already down 37% from its recent peak, its elevated valuation leaves room for more downside.
The second stock to sell: Datadog Businesses use Datadog's (DDOG +0.03%) cloud observability platform to monitor their digital infrastructure around the clock, because it can immediately warn them if a technical glitch is impacting their sales channels or operational software. This allows them to implement fixes before customers are affected, minimizing downtime and lost sales.
But over the past couple of years, Datadog has launched a series of observability products specifically for the AI industry. There is LLM Observability, which helps developers identify technical issues, track costs, and monitor output quality when they are building large language models (LLMs). There is also GPU Monitoring, which helps businesses track costs and technical bugs when deploying AI infrastructure.
Datadog had 33,400 customers at the conclusion of the second quarter, and 750 of them were AI-native enterprises. "All 10 of the top 10 AI leaders are Datadog customers," said the company on its Q2 earnings call. So, although Datadog did not specifically name them, it's reasonable to assume the likes of Anthropic and OpenAI are among its clients.
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Datadog recently increased its annual revenue guidance for 2026 to between $4.45 billion and $4.47 billion, but that might be a conservative range because of how rapidly the use of its AI products is growing. For example, the company said Model Context Protocol (MCP) server calls quadrupled during the second quarter compared to the first quarter, which means there was substantially more AI activity happening in the Datadog ecosystem.
But Datadog's valuation might be a problem for investors who are looking for big returns. Its stock is trading at a P/S ratio of 21.8, so it's far more expensive than the Nasdaq-100. It also makes Datadog pricey compared to many other companies in the AI software space, including industry leaders like Microsoft and Alphabet.
DDOG PS Ratio data by YCharts.
As a result, I think Datadog stock could be vulnerable to a sharp correction if the broader market runs into turbulence.
A company that grows revenue 92% and still loses half a billion dollars is doing two very different things at once. SpaceX (SPCX +1.55%) did exactly that in the second quarter.
The rocket maker booked $7.8 billion of revenue across its three businesses, up 92% from a year earlier, and still lost $541 million.
The segment tables explain how. One business, the connectivity segment built around Starlink, earned a $1.66 billion operating profit. The other two, the original space business and the artificial intelligence (AI) unit, lost a combined $1.8 billion. And the AI unit absorbed $15.8 billion of the quarter's $18.4 billion in capital spending.
In other words, one segment pays the bills while another spends at a pace the earner can't come close to covering. That split, more than the growth, is what the stock's nearly $1.9 trillion valuation turns on, I'd argue.
Image source: Getty Images.
The profitable segment is bigger than StarlinkThe headline profit belongs to Starlink, but the segment earning it is broader than the consumer satellite internet service.
SpaceX's connectivity segment combines consumer Starlink ($2.5 billion of second-quarter revenue, up 44% year over year) with an enterprise and government business that grew 108% to $1.8 billion. The latter got help from new airline agreements and more than $6 billion in multi-year U.S. government contracts for Starshield, the company's secure satellite network for government customers.
Add it up, and connectivity revenue rose 66% year over year to $4.3 billion, while the segment's operating profit climbed 79% to $1.66 billion.
Notably, the growth is coming from subscribers. Starlink ended June with 12 million subscribers, double a year earlier, while average revenue per user held at $66 a month for a second straight quarter, down from $85 a year ago.
What the segment doesn't spend matters just as much. Connectivity's capital expenditures were $1.4 billion in the quarter, less than its operating profit. This is the one SpaceX business that funds itself.
The $15.8 billion quarterThe AI unit is the opposite case. The segment spent $15.8 billion on capital expenditures in three months, 86% of the company's total. It spent $7.7 billion in the first quarter and $749 million in the year-ago period. That is a roughly 20-fold increase in four quarters, with the money going into the Colossus II data center build-out that pushed the company's compute capacity to 1.4 gigawatts, up from 0.4 a year ago.
The spending is buying growth, to be fair. AI revenue more than tripled year over year to $2.6 billion, driven by cloud computing agreements ($14.1 billion in contracted sales signed during the quarter), and the segment's operating loss narrowed to $1.3 billion from $2.5 billion in the first quarter. But the segment still loses money.
And the space segment added a $542 million operating loss of its own on $962 million of revenue, up 29%, as the company accelerated research and development spending on Starship -- spending it plans to extend with a Louisiana launch complex, announced Aug. 25, that could cost up to $100 billion.
But who pays for all this? Not the profitable segment, at least not alone. Connectivity's $1.66 billion quarterly operating profit covers about a tenth of the AI unit's quarterly capital bill.
The rest comes from the balance sheet. SpaceX ended June with $100 billion of cash, cash equivalents, and marketable securities, built largely from about $85.7 billion in net proceeds from its June initial public offering (IPO). A $25 billion bond sale mostly refinanced a bridge loan, at a weighted average rate of about 5.9%.
What is the stock priced for?Shares sit near $142 as of this writing, close to the $135 offering price, and SpaceX's market value is roughly $1.9 trillion -- about 60 times sales, annualizing the second quarter.
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A sales multiple like that is not a bet on the business that already works. Starlink's economics are impressive, and arguably proven. But a segment producing about $6.6 billion in annualized operating profit doesn't support a $1.9 trillion price on its own.
The valuation is mostly a claim about the money-losing unit. It assumes today's $15.8 billion quarters convert into an AI infrastructure business big enough to justify them.
Maybe they will. The AI segment's revenue is scaling fast, its losses are narrowing, and on segment adjusted EBITDA (non-GAAP) the unit even earned $1.1 billion in the quarter. But shareholders are paying for that conversion up front, while the segment that reliably earns money could, by itself, justify only a fraction of the price.
Ultimately, the second quarter answered which business pays for the others. Starlink's segment pays, the AI unit spends, and the stock trades on the spender's future. The profitable business is excellent. But at about 60 times annualized sales, I'd stay on the sidelines for now.
SpaceX paid $60 billion for a coding tool that Russian hackers had already turned into a weapon, and now the remediation bill lands on a company that never built the product and cannot fully control its underlying model.
SpaceX (NASDAQ:SPCX | SPCX Price Prediction) closed one of the largest software acquisitions in history in August, paying $60 billion in stock for Cursor’s parent company. The deal accelerates the AI push that drove 247% year-over-year growth in the company’s AI segment last quarter. But SpaceX inherited more than a coding assistant.
Days before the transaction closed, Reuters reported that Russian-speaking hackers had manipulated Cursor into helping breach at least seven companies earlier in the year. The attacks predate SpaceX’s ownership, but remediation does not. Shares trade at $141.50, up 25.72% over the past month, suggesting the market has yet to price in the trust problem for a product valued in the fifteen figures.
How Attackers Turned the Tool The Aurora ransomware group did not hack Cursor traditionally. Researchers uncovered more than two dozen conversations in which the attackers falsely described their intrusions as authorized simulations and persuaded the agent to hunt for credentials on their behalf.
Cursor refused malicious commands, but attackers simply restarted sessions until they got a different answer. Session-level guardrails that reset on each conversation are just speed bumps.
Identified victims included Belgium’s Christeyns, Germany’s Teckentrup and Louisiana-based Bayou Title. The underlying model powering the campaign was Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet 4.5, which SpaceX now inherits as a dependency it did not build and cannot fully control.
A $60 Billion Trust Problem The chronology matters. SpaceX did not own Cursor when the breaches occurred, and there is no evidence management knew about the campaign before closing. SpaceX owns the integration and remediation work now at a price that assumes Cursor is a differentiator rather than a liability.
On the Q2 call, Gwynne Shotwell said the company was “looking forward to welcoming the Cursor team to SpaceX to integrate our engineering and begin to benefit from a combined sales capability.” Elon Musk tied Cursor directly to Grok’s roadmap. Neither addressed security posture.
This campaign exposed safeguards too brittle for the valuation. Every AI agent faces prompt injection, but few are priced like Cursor, and fewer still are folded into a company that manages $18.4 billion in quarterly CapEx and a $47.5 billion backlog.
Sizing the Risk Against the Whole Enterprise SpaceX operates at a scale far beyond a coding startup. It generated $7.81 billion in Q2 revenue, doubled Starlink subscribers to 12.0 million, and finished the quarter with $100 billion in cash. Cursor is a rounding error on the balance sheet, but a meaningful weight on reputation.
Analysts have a target of $219.22, with 27 buys and 2 sells. Reuters also reported that OpenAI is ending its partnership with Cursor, narrowing the model bench as questions about trust widen.
Watch how quickly SpaceX rearchitects session-level controls, and whether enterprise customers keep buying seats, because the acquisition thesis depends on the product consistently rejecting malicious prompts rather than only on the first attempt.
Contact [email protected] for any questions or corrections.
Space Exploration Technologies (SPCX +0.66%), or SpaceX for short, went public about two and a half months ago, with a first-day open price of $150. It closed at about $142 on Aug. 28, so it has gotten cheaper, although the price fluctuates often.
If you wanted more information about SpaceX before investing, there are now a couple of months of trading data and its first earnings report as a public company available. Based on that, here are two good reasons to buy SpaceX stock and one reason to keep waiting.
Image source: The Motley Fool.
Starlink is growing quickly and is highly profitable SpaceX has three business segments, and the Space segment soaks up much of the attention. It's hard to compete with rocket launches and plans to go to Mars, after all. But the Connectivity segment, built around its Starlink satellites, is the real moneymaker.
Connectivity made revenue of $4.3 billion in Q2 2026, up 66% year over year. That also accounted for 55% of the company's total revenue, and Connectivity was the only profitable segment, with operating income of $1.7 billion.
Starlink has a dominant market share. Ookla reported that 97% of its global speed test samples for satellite internet came from Starlink users in Q3 2025. The potential issue is that it doesn't have much room to expand, since it already controls so much of the market, but Starlink's subscriber numbers suggest otherwise. It went from six million subscribers in Q2 2025 to 12 million in Q2 2026. SpaceX also acquired wireless spectrum licenses from EchoStar last year, which drives further growth by enabling Starlink to provide direct-to-cell service.
SpaceX's unique AI strategy could be a powerful growth engine SpaceX's artificial intelligence segment, which began with its acquisition of xAI in February, generated $2.6 billion in revenue in Q2 2026. But it's expensive to run, so this segment had an operating loss of $1.3 billion that quarter and $15.8 billion in capex.
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While skeptics have balked at this spending, it's a normal part of an AI infrastructure build-out and fuels a multifaceted AI strategy. SpaceX sells compute to major tech and AI companies, including Alphabet and Anthropic. The space company expanded its AI software lineup with the acquisition of Cursor, a popular AI code editor. CEO Elon Musk also has an ambitious long-term vision to launch orbital data centers.
I put more stock in SpaceX's compute deals and AI software, including Grok and Cursor, than in the plans for data centers in space. Regardless, it has a diverse AI stack, which is another reason it's an interesting investment opportunity.
The hype has outrun the fundamentals Although SpaceX is a genuinely exciting business, it also has some glaring issues. It has a market cap of $1.9 trillion, making it one of the world's largest public companies, despite being unprofitable. SpaceX lost $4.8 billion over the first half of 2026. It also trades at 90 times trailing sales, an extremely rich valuation compared with other companies of its size. Even Tesla, another Musk-led company trading at a premium, trades at 12 times its trailing sales.
Given SpaceX's volatility so far, and the fact that insider shares will gradually unlock in tranches over the rest of the year, it's a very risky investment at this stage. If you're interested, consider waiting to see whether insider unlocks create selling pressure, as that could provide a much better entry point.
Characteristics and Risks of Standardized Options: https://bit.ly/2v9tH6D. Sky-high revenue projections in SpaceX (SPCX) from some analysts have Kevin Hincks keeping an eye on the stock's forward momentum.
The Roman telescope launch adds another high-profile government mission to SpaceX's Falcon Heavy record. Summary
NASA’s Roman telescope cost about $4.3 billionSpaceX launched it aboard a Falcon Heavy rocket
Space Exploration Technologies Corp. (SPCX, Financials), the aerospace company, successfully launched NASA's $4.3 billion Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope aboard a Falcon Heavy rocket from Cape Canaveral, Florida.
The telescope is beginning a mission expected to last five to 10 years and will eventually operate roughly 1 million miles from Earth.
For SpaceX, the investor angle is less about the telescope's scientific goals and more about what the launch says about government demand for its heavy-lift capabilities.
Falcon Heavy has become an important part of SpaceX's launch portfolio for large and complex payloads, including high-value government missions.
Roman will study dark matter, dark energy and planets outside the solar system. NASA expects scientific observations to begin as early as December, with the first images due in 2027.
The telescope can survey the sky roughly 1,000 times faster than Hubble and uses a wide-field infrared camera capable of capturing far larger areas at once.
L3Harris Technologies supplied the 2.4-meter Optical Telescope Assembly used by the mission.
For SpaceX, each successful government launch adds another proof point for reliability as agencies award increasingly expensive space contracts.
The next test will be whether Falcon Heavy continues winning high-value government missions as NASA and defense spending on space infrastructure expands.
Disclosures I/we have no positions in any stocks mentioned, and have no plans to buy any new positions in the stocks mentioned within the next 72 hours.
Starship launches of the Mobile V2 constellation begin in mid-2027 Summary
Bernstein held Outperform and $248 while calling direct-to-device the hardest part of SpaceX's business, a segment it has questioned before.
Bernstein SocGen reiterated an Outperform rating and $248 price target on SpaceX SPCX, while calling direct-to-device mobile the most difficult part of the business to make work. SpaceX shares were up 0.93% intraday.
The note came from the firm's US communications infrastructure and telecom teams, and works through what a SpaceX mobile buildout would cost and what it would mean for carriers and tower operators. SpaceX plans to begin Starship launches of its Mobile V2 satellite constellation in mid-2027. Bernstein had already questioned whether direct-to-device economics hold up without a terrestrial partner in an earlier report on the same subject.
Bernstein stayed positive on launch services, orbital data centers, and Starlink broadband across consumer, enterprise and government customers. SpaceX generated $23 billion in revenue over the trailing twelve months at a 52% gross margin and is not yet profitable. The spread on the street is wide, with targets running from $117 to $450 against a stock that listed in June at $135.
Disclosures I/we have no positions in any stocks mentioned, and have no plans to buy any new positions in the stocks mentioned within the next 72 hours.
The second time was the charm for China -- almost.
On Wednesday last week, Aug. 19, China's LandSpace launched a ZhuQue-3 rocket on its second attempt to make the rocket "reusable." The ZhuQue-3 launched successfully, reached orbital velocity, and deposited a customer's satellite into orbit with its second stage. The rocket's first stage then initiated a reentry burn, returned to Earth, and landed -- just like a SpaceX Falcon 9.
Well, almost like a SpaceX Falcon 9.
Image source: The Motley Fool.
Close, but no cigar Upon landing, it appears ZhuQue-3 still had a lot of fuel in the tank, which proceeded to burn off after landing, igniting several fires on the landing pad. The heat from these fires melted one of the rocket's landing legs, causing ZhuQue-3 to topple over several hours after landing. LandSpace, which had planned to build a new ZhuQue-3 for Flight 3, then refurbish and reuse this one on its fourth flight, may now need to rethink that plan.
It's still quite an accomplishment for LandSpace, which has come very close to duplicating the success that is Space Exploration Technologies' (SPCX +0.45%) Falcon 9 reusable rocket.
LandSpace isn't done imitating SpaceX. Plans (now perhaps set back a bit by the toppling) envision lengthening ZhuQue-3 to 76.6 meters tall, tweaking the design to use more powerful TQ-12B and TQ-15B engines, adding more fuel, and thus upgrading the entire rocket to the point where it can carry payloads of up to 18.3 metric tons to low Earth orbit.
Should SpaceX investors be nervous?
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Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery Not necessarily, not immediately, no.
Consider: Even in the matter of payload, SpaceX retains a sizable advantage over LandSpace. After multiple upgrades over the years, its Falcon 9 now carries a maximum payload to LEO of 22.8 kilograms. That's 25% better than ZhuQue will have even after it completes its upgrade and before LandSpace works out all the kinks of landing and reuse.
Granted, a 25% advantage may not seem quite so impressive given that SpaceX has been launching and landing reusable rockets since 2015 and has more than a decade's head start on LandSpace. Granted, too, LandSpace isn't the only space company that has taken a page from SpaceX's reusability notebook and used it to build reusable rockets of their own.
Right here in America, Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin successfully launched and landed a rocket at sea (an arguably even tougher task than landing on land) on its second try last year. Sir Peter Beck at Rocket Lab (RKLB -4.65%) is also working on a reusable spacecraft, the Neutron medium-lift rocket. That one could begin launching in early 2027 -- or even later this year.
At an estimated 13 tons of payload to LEO, Neutron then will be roughly the same size as China's ZhuQue-3 is now.
SpaceX remains best in class When you do the math, though, these numbers still confirm that SpaceX and its Falcon 9 remain best-in-class in space, offering the longest record of reliability, the biggest payloads, and the best price per kilogram to orbit. And here's the real reveal that shows how far ahead of the competition SpaceX is:
As everyone else on Earth races to catch up to Falcon 9, SpaceX just signaled that Falcon 9 is already obsolete technology and will be discontinued in favor of Starship.
Once Starship is flying reliably several times per week, it makes sense to shift super scarce SpaceX engineering and production resources to Starship to get launch rate to several times per day, which means winding down Falcon
-- Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 22, 2026 On July 24, SpaceX conducted its most successful Starship test flight yet, using V3 versions of both its Super Heavy booster and Ship second stage to put 20 V3 Starlink satellites in orbit. Ship then conducted a successful soft splashdown in the Indian Ocean, and Super Heavy a (somewhat less) successful landing in the Gulf. With the kinks now mostly worked out on both elements of the craft, SpaceX plans to attempt its first-ever tower-catch landing of the Ship on its 14th test flight next month, setting the stage for full reusability of Starship.
Already, SpaceX is looking forward to the day when Starship is "flying reliably several times per week," carrying more than 100 metric tons to orbit with each flight. Once this goal is reached, Elon Musk plans to begin shutting down Falcon 9 production and switching all SpaceX work to Starship.
By the time LandSpace, Blue Origin, and Rocket Lab finally catch up to SpaceX in the Falcon 9 race, SpaceX will already have moved on to win the next race -- with Starship.
After a volatile start as a public company, SpaceX (NASDAQ: SPCX) stock has regained momentum in recent weeks, boosting returns for investors who bought during its late-July pullback.
In this context, a $1,000 investment in SpaceX stock on July 29 would now be worth approximately $1,259, based on the share price rising from $112 to $141 at press time. The gain represents a return of about 25.9% in just one month.
Indeed, SPCX shares purchased a month ago would have generated a profit of about $259.
SPCX one-month stock price chart. Source: Finbold Notably, SpaceX shares began trading on the Nasdaq in June following what became the largest initial public offering in history. The stock debuted at $135 before rallying to an all-time high above $225 during its first week of trading.
However, the early excitement faded as investors weighed heavy capital expenditure plans and the impact of lockup-related share releases. The stock eventually dropped below its IPO price and reached lows near $112 by late July.
SpaceX stock rebound Since then, sentiment has improved significantly, helping shares recover nearly 26% over the past month.
The rebound followed SpaceX’s first quarterly earnings report as a public company. The company reported second-quarter revenue of $7.8 billion, representing roughly 92% year-over-year growth and exceeding analyst expectations. Adjusted EBITDA climbed to about $3.5 billion, while the quarterly loss narrowed substantially.
Starlink remained the company’s largest revenue contributor, generating more than $4 billion during the quarter as subscriber growth continued to accelerate. The artificial intelligence segment also recorded strong growth, supported by new cloud-computing and infrastructure agreements.
Beyond financial results, SpaceX has continued expanding its launch and satellite operations. The company has maintained a high Falcon 9 launch cadence while growing the Starlink constellation and advancing Starship testing programs.
SpaceX’s ambitions also extend beyond rockets and satellites. The company has outlined plans for a major launch complex along Louisiana’s Gulf Coast to support future high-volume Starship operations. The project represents a multi-billion-dollar investment and could create thousands of jobs over time.
In parallel, SpaceX has continued integrating assets from its acquisition of artificial intelligence company xAI while expanding software capabilities and developing specialized AI satellite infrastructure. Management has also highlighted plans to increase terrestrial computing capacity as demand for AI services continues to grow.
These initiatives have helped position SpaceX across several high-growth industries, including space transportation, satellite communications, and artificial intelligence infrastructure.
Featured image via Shutterstock
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OpenAI just pulled model access from Cursor the moment SpaceX took ownership, turning a years-long personal feud into a live stress test of who actually controls AI infrastructure and who gets left scrambling.
The long-running dispute between OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Elon Musk has simmered for years, rooted in Musk’s exit from the AI lab he co-founded and his subsequent legal and public challenges over its direction. That rivalry just moved from boardroom barbs to operational consequences.
On Friday, OpenAI cut off model access for Cursor after SpaceX (NASDAQ:SPCX | SPCX Price Prediction) completed its $60 billion acquisition of the coding platform, turning a personal and philosophical clash into a concrete test of control over AI infrastructure.
The Compute Advantage at the Center OpenAI threw shade at Musk, directly naming him as the reason behind its decision:
“We are making this choice because we cannot be confident that SpaceX will use our technology within our terms of service, based on our experience with Elon Musk’s companies violating contracts.”
Beyond the drama, though, the real story sits in SpaceX’s Colossus clusters. The system seeks to scale to the equivalent of 1 million Nvidia (NASDAQ:NVDA) H100 chips. That hardware is the bottleneck Cursor itself flagged before the deal: the coding tool needed massive dedicated compute to train competitive models of its own.
By owning both the compute and now the application layer that reaches expert software engineers, SpaceX is running the same vertical-integration playbook it used to drive launch costs from roughly $10,000 per kilogram down toward $100. Cursor brought roughly $4 billion in annualized revenue at the time of the acquisition at a 15-times multiple. Folding that distribution into Colossus removes reliance on rival labs and turns a potential supplier risk into an owned asset.
Ironically, OpenAI’s decision accelerates rather than derails that plan. Cursor can still route developers to their own OpenAI API keys or other providers in the interim, and Anthropic has already signaled increased Claude support. Yet future OpenAI models, including the forthcoming Astra, stay off the table. That pushes SpaceX harder toward proprietary Grok-powered coding agents trained on its own iron.
Even so, SpaceX says that OpenAI serve about 5% of Cursor user traffic, and it is working with OpenAI to resolve the dispute.
What the Numbers Say for SpaceX Shareholders SpaceX closed at $141.50 on Friday, giving it a market capitalization of about $1.92 trillion, up from $1.77 trillion at its June 12 IPO. The $60 billion Cursor purchase represented roughly 2% to 3% dilution depending on the exact share-price timing. Analysts tracking the name put average price targets near $219, implying more than 50% upside from recent levels, with revenue-growth forecasts exceeding 100% over three years in some models.
Compare that to pure-play AI peers that still rent compute. SpaceX already monetizes excess capacity to outside customers while keeping the densest clusters for internal use. Cursor’s developer dataset — edit histories, completions, agent traces — now feeds directly into those clusters. In short, the feud removes one external dependency and strengthens the case that SpaceX’s AI segment can scale without margin leakage to competitors.
Granted, integration risks exist. Cursor users may grumble during the transition, and execution on proprietary models is never guaranteed. That said, SpaceX has repeatedly converted ambitious hardware timelines into operational reality. The $10 billion alternative fee in the original April partnership terms shows both sides priced the compute relationship as valuable either way.
Key Takeaway Smart investors should view the OpenAI cutoff as confirmation that SpaceX’s ownership of Colossus-scale compute plus a leading coding interface creates durable optionality in AI. The $60 billion all-stock deal already embeds Cursor’s $4 billion run-rate into a $1.92 trillion platform.
Long-term investors who believe vertical integration will compound the same way launch costs did now have clearer evidence the strategy is in motion. Short-term noise around the feud is real, yet the underlying asset — owned compute powering an owned application layer — remains the more important signal.
Contact [email protected] for any questions or corrections.
One of the most anticipated IPOs in a long time, Space Exploration Technologies (SPCX +0.45%), went public in mid-June, shattering records for new issues. SpaceX raised $86 billion in total from its IPO, valuing the company at about $1.77 trillion.
Now that SpaceX is a publicly traded company, institutional investors are required to disclose any stakes in the company on their quarterly 13F filings. Form 13F shows publicly traded U.S. stock positions held by institutional investors with more than $100 million under management at the end of each quarter, and they must be filed within 45 days of the end of each quarter. That means Aug. 14 revealed exactly which big institutional investors held SpaceX shares at the end of the quarter and how much they owned.
The so-called "smart money" is overweight in SpaceX relative to the total market. Should small retail investors join in?
Image source: The Motley Fool.
Who owns SpaceX stock? SpaceX stock appeared in 1,932 13F filings last quarter. The total value held by institutional investors was $611 billion. Goldman Sachs analysts found SpaceX was widely held among hedge fund managers, and mutual funds as a group were overweight in the stock. Pension funds and endowments also owned significant stakes in the space stock. And 13F filers with SpaceX in their reports included several early investors that held massive stakes in the company.
The biggest SpaceX shareholders were Alphabet, private equity investor Valor Management, and Fidelity Investments. All three were early investors in SpaceX, with Alphabet and Fidelity investing $1 billion in the company back in 2015, and Valor first partnering with SpaceX in 2008. As of the end of June, the three held approximately $232 billion in stock. There are several other early investors that top the list, with huge equity stakes in the business.
It's also possible that hedge funds gained access to the stock before it was publicly traded. Mutual funds, however, are the strongest signal that investment managers believe the stock could produce strong returns. That said, it could be a form of job protection. Managers could look foolish if they didn't buy SpaceX stock and it exploded higher, but they won't look so foolish just for buying the most highly anticipated IPO in a long time, regardless of whether it goes up or down.
The first 13F filings revealing stakes in SpaceX don't actually tell us much about how smart money feels about the company now that it's a publicly traded stock. We'll need to wait until the next quarterly filing to see how things change. It doesn't help that there's a 45-day delay between the end of the quarter and the filing's release. And that puts retail investors in a precarious position.
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Why the smart money could make retail investors pay SpaceX only sold about 5% of the company to public investors at its IPO. CEO Elon Musk owns about 48% of shares, and he has said he doesn't plan to sell any. That left roughly 47% of shares with early investors or insiders, who are subject to lockups following the IPO. SpaceX is using a staggered lockup expiration to release shares slowly into the market to avoid market shocks.
While some of the 1,932 institutional investors reporting SpaceX stock on their 13Fs last quarter were buyers into the IPO, it remains to be seen whether those mutual funds and hedge funds buying the stock can offset the selling pressure from early investors when lockups expire. We already saw two big lockup expirations in August. The market absorbed the first one quite well, but the second expiration put pressure on the share price.
There are six more lockup expirations before the end of 2026, including two more before the end of the third quarter. What big early investors like Alphabet, Valor, and Fidelity do will be a key data point for investors to consider, but we won't know their moves until mid-November.
Meanwhile, SpaceX stock is extremely expensive. The largest growth driver for the business in the near term is its neocloud operations, selling AI compute to supply-constrained AI labs. While the revenue is substantial, so are the capital expenditures. The business's long-term profitability relies on its reusable rocket technology, which increases its capacity to launch satellites that serve both the compute and connectivity markets. That makes the stock very risky and more subject to market forces than fundamental earnings results in the near term. As a result, the actions of large institutional investors will have a significant impact on retail investors for some time, even if they plan to buy and hold for the long term.
SpaceX could turn out to be a great long-term investment, but with the high valuation and high level of uncertainty, and potential institutional selling, it might be worth waiting for more clarity and a more attractive entry point.
OpenAI announced late Friday that it is ending developers' access to its models on Cursor, following the acquisition of the AI coding startup by Elon Musk's SpaceX earlier this month.
Cursor CEO Michael Truell said, in a post on the SpaceX-owned social network X Friday night: "OpenAI models serve about 5% of Cursor user traffic, and we're speaking with the OpenAI team to resolve this. Cursor was one of the very first users of OpenAI, we've worked closely with their team for years, and we've trusted their platform to be neutral infrastructure for our business."
In their announcement, OpenAI said, "We are making this choice because we cannot be confident that SpaceX will use our technology within our terms of service, based on our experience with Elon Musk's companies violating contracts."
Its "proposed shutoff date" for OpenAI models via Cursor is Nov. 12, 2026. OpenAI also said it would not provide future models to Cursor as it winds down the agreement.
Cursor and OpenAI did not immediately respond to CNBC's requests for comment.
SpaceX completed its $60 billion acquisition of Cursor on Aug. 14, according to financial filings. Before SpaceX went public in June, it had acquired Musk's X and xAI in February.
watch now
OpenAI's move away from Cursor, now that SpaceX owns it, is part of a long-running and acrimonious clash between Musk and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and President Greg Brockman.
In a post on X on Saturday, Musk wrote, "I couldn't care less. Scam Altman and Greg Stockman are utterly untrustworthy," used an expletive to describe them, then repeated his claim that they "stole an open source nonprofit."
Musk sued OpenAI, Altman and Brockman in 2024 after co-founding and helping to fund the AI company as a non-profit research lab in 2015.
Musk left OpenAI's board in 2018 after hiring talent away from the company, cutting off donations he had promised to OpenAI, and clashing with fellow board members over its direction. He later became one of its most prominent critics.
After Musk left, OpenAI launched massively successful AI products, namely ChatGPT, struck partnerships with tech titans including Microsoft, converted its business into a for-profit with a non-profit parent, and raised huge sums of funding.
Musk has argued in court that OpenAI's restructuring violated its founding commitments and has described the change as "stealing a charity." OpenAI disputes his claims. While he lost his lawsuit earlier this year, Musk has vowed to appeal.
As the market for "vibe coding" — or AI-assisted coding tools — heats up, OpenAI is poised to go public next year, while rival Anthropic has been holding preliminary meetings with bankers ahead of a possible IPO this year at an expected valuation as high as $2 trillion, CNBC previously reported.
OpenAI's choice to end developers' access to its models via Cursor is not a first in the industry.
Last June, Anthropic — which is now partnering with SpaceX and renting compute capacity from Musk's company — blocked Windsurf access to its Claude AI models.
Anthropic co-founder and executive Tom Brown wrote in a post on X on Friday night, "Cursor has been a trusted partner of Anthropic since Sonnet 3.5. We'll continue to increase compute to support Claude models in Cursor and are excited for what comes next with them at SpaceX."
His post drew criticism from some technology executives on X, with Replit CEO Amjad Masad reminding Brown of Anthropic's history with Windsurf, and Docker executive Mat Velloso replying, "This was a great opportunity to stay quiet."
After a few months, Space Exploration Technologies (SPCX +0.45%) stock has gone on a wild ride, but it now trades right around its initial public offering (IPO) price of $135. Wall Street analysts are much more optimistic about the stock, with an average price target of $218 across the industry.
Many Wall Street analysts believe that SpaceX's radical ambitions for artificial intelligence (AI) and space-based services will set the record-breaking IPO to the stratosphere, and that the stock price will keep moving higher. But are they right?
Here's a breakdown of SpaceX's business ambitions and whether you should follow Wall Street and buy its stock today.
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Ambitious AI growth AI is the major market theme of the decade, and Elon Musk and SpaceX plan to cash in on it in a big way. The company is aggressively building data center capacity on earth, which will power its own AI services like the Grok chatbot, as well as selling to third-party providers. This makes SpaceX a neocloud company competing with Amazon Web Services (AWS) for compute services.
SpaceX's AI revenue was $2.56 billion last quarter. However, because of its massive capital spending, Musk believes its annual recurring revenue (ARR) will grow to $100 billion by the end of 2026, which could mean about $25 billion in AI revenue in Q4 alone. This will be achieved through contracts with other AI players hunting for computing power, such as Anthropic, which signed a large deal with SpaceX.
Long-term, Musk believes SpaceX can reach $1 trillion in revenue by 2030, primarily through AI infrastructure investments on Earth and, eventually, in orbit. It is going to cost a lot to get these facilities up and running -- AI capital expenditures were $15.8 billion last quarter alone -- but the company believes there is a massive opportunity in AI infrastructure that will lead to billions, and eventually trillions, in revenue.
Image source: Getty Images.
Where will profits come from? Right now, all these AI investments are losing money for SpaceX. It had a segment operating loss of $1.2 billion and is burning a ton of free cash flow to scale up its infrastructure. Long-term, it is difficult to estimate how fat (or not) the AI segment's profit margins will be at maturity, but it will be a long way until that happens, especially once you consider the costs of delivering and monitoring data center assets in orbit.
In the short-term, profitability can be relied on from the Starlink internet service. Last quarter, its revenue grew 66% year-over-year to $4.2 billion, with $1.67 billion in operating earnings. In fact, it is the only profitable segment at SpaceX, as the space launch segment is currently losing money.
Rapid growth for Starlink gives the business a solid profit trajectory. If Starlink revenue can scale to $50 billion a year within a few years, a profit margin of 39% (which is what the Starlink division generated last quarter) would mean $19.5 billion in segment earnings.
Is Wall Street right about SpaceX? $19.5 billion in segment earnings may be a lot for most companies, but this is just a splash in the bucket for a stock with a market cap of $1.9 trillion. If it were to reach the average Wall Street price target of $218, the market cap would approach $3 trillion.
Compared to Starlink's segment operating earnings, that would be an earnings multiple well over 100x, based on forward estimates a few years ahead.
With this in mind, the potential for SpaceX stock all comes down to the investments in AI and how profitable they can be. If SpaceX can deliver its promise of $1 trillion in revenue with a decent profit margin, maybe the stock deserves to trade at the average Wall Street price target. But if you think these are grandiose claims with little chance of actually happening, the right bet is to avoid SpaceX stock for your portfolio.
Space Exploration Technologies (SPCX +0.45%), better known as SpaceX, has taken investors on a rollercoaster ride this summer. Its stock skyrocketed after SpaceX conducted the largest initial public offering (IPO) in history. Then came a brutal 46% plunge.
However, SpaceX began turning things around in early August. The artificial intelligence (AI) and space technology stock clawed back as much as 35% of its prior gains before momentum stalled. Is this only a temporary lull, or is the Trump administration inadvertently slamming the brakes on SpaceX's roaring rebound?
Image source: SpaceX.
Trump's triple-whammy of major macroeconomic movesOn Aug. 19, 2026, President Trump proclaimed that the U.S. would launch economic sanctions against Iran that he described as the "most crushing economic operation ever taken against any country." He stated in a Truth Social post that "this will be Economic Warfare and Isolation on an unprecedented scale."
Economic pressure on Iran is less worrisome to investors than an escalating military conflict. However, the president vowed that any country that helps Iran in nearly any way would also face economic consequences from the U.S. This statement created uncertainty about the full impact of Trump's economic war against Iran.
The White House also ignited a trade war with Canada, the second-largest trading partner for the U.S. Trump recently levied 50% tariffs on products imported into the U.S. from Canada, including automobiles. In response, Canada announced retaliatory tariffs of up to 50% on roughly $20 billion of U.S. imports to the country.
Adding to the uncertainty, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced on Aug. 19 that the federal government will double the size of its long-term Treasury bond buybacks. Wall Street was skeptical about the move. Billionaire Stanley Druckenmiller, who was once Bessent's mentor, wrote in an op-ed article for The Wall Street Journal that the buybacks were a mistake and could damage the credibility of the U.S. Treasury Department.
How SpaceX is affectedWhat do these macroeconomic moves have to do with SpaceX's rebound losing steam? More than you might think at first glance.
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First, a full-blown economic war against Iran (and any country that provides it with assistance) could lead to higher oil prices. Higher oil prices translate to higher inflation. And when inflation is higher, the Federal Reserve is more likely to raise rates rather than cut or hold them steady. Higher interest rates mean the discount rate investors use to value a company's future cash flows increases. Growth stocks such as SpaceX can get hit hard by the recalibration because much of their value hinges on expected future earnings.
One big impact of Trump's trade with Canada is that the U.S. imports steel and aluminum from its northern neighbor. Guess what materials are used to build SpaceX's rockets, boosters, and launch pads? Steel and aluminum are high on the list. The company's input costs will rise directly as a result of the president's tariffs. Higher costs pressure margins.
As for the Treasury bond buybacks, the story is more complicated. Bessent clearly hopes that repurchasing long-dated bonds will cause yields to decline. But while yields did dip initially, they quickly rose again. The key concern is that the federal government could lose credibility (as Druckenmiller argued in his op-ed). Such a scenario could lead to a "risk-off" market dynamic where stocks priced at a high premium (like SpaceX) get hammered.
To be clear, President Trump didn't target SpaceX or its founder, Elon Musk, when he decided to ratchet up economic pressure on Iran, pick a trade fight with Canada, and support his Treasury Secretary in a questionable bond buyback. However, SpaceX is nonetheless impacted by all three moves.
But is SpaceX's rebound over? Not necessarily. Tech companies continue to spend heavily on AI infrastructure, which is great news for SpaceX's AI business. Starlink's momentum remains exceptionally strong.
Still, stocks' trajectories are greatly affected by macroeconomic factors. Trump didn't intend to bring SpaceX's rebound to a screeching halt, but he just might do it anyway.
By now you may have heard the news: Elon Musk's Space Exploration Technologies (SPCX +0.45%) company is coming to Louisiana -- and bringing a pile of cash along for the ride.
On Aug. 25, SpaceX said it planned to develop a high-volume launch facility for Starship on the Louisiana Gulf Coast. The site will host 10 Starship launch pads, deep-water shipping ports and vehicle processing facilities for receiving cargo, and an airport, and will cost $100 billion to build. It won't all be spent at once, of course, but construction will begin in 2027, with the first launch pad expected to be operational by 2029, and further work continuing after that.
Image source: The Motley Fool.
Arguably even more important than the infrastructure is the location chosen for Starbase Louisiana.
As far back as May, speculation began floating around that SpaceX was interested in Louisiana. One notable post on X (coincidentally, also owned by Elon Musk and part of SpaceX) said that SpaceX "may have acquired or is acquiring 136k acres (212 sq miles) of marshland" on the Louisiana coast. In a flash of insight, this poster observed that the site in question had access to natural gas pipelines owned by Cheniere Energy (LNG +0.55%) and ExxonMobil (XOM +0.17%) subsidiary Golden Pass LNG.
SPACEX: A realtor named Jim Keaty of Keaty Real Estate published a rumor of possible SpaceX land acquisition in Louisiana.
It states SpaceX may have acquired or is acquiring 136k acres (212 sq miles) of marshland south of Highway 82 toward the Gulf of America in Pecan Island... https://t.co/3mv5Do8sTP pic.twitter.com/c36x41kNMw
-- S.E. Robinson, Jr. (@SERobinsonJr) May 4, 2026 And why is that important? Well, consider that every Starship launched consumes about 1,040 metric tons of rocket fuel.
Now, natural gas is primarily composed of methane (as much as 97%). Once purified to remove contaminants such as CO2, oxygen, nitrogen, and other gases, it can be cooled to yield liquid methane -- itself the primary component of methalox rocket fuel.
Translation: SpaceX is building its new Starbase atop two gas lines that already exist, and that deliver straight to Elon Musk's doorstep all the rocket fuel his Starships will ever need.
What this means to investors Following SpaceX's confirmation of speculation that it will build its second-ever Starbase in Louisiana, many commenters rushed in to opine on the financial wisdom of the move and on SpaceX's ability to raise the $100 billion it expects to spend to complete the project.
Neither of which worries me.
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SpaceX has a market capitalization of $1.9 trillion just a little more than two months after its initial public offering (IPO) in June. More importantly, according to the latest data from S&P Global Market Intelligence, SpaceX already has $100 billion in the bank. If Elon Musk were so inclined, he could literally pre-pay to build Starbase Louisiana today and then take all the time he needs to get the 10 launch pads up and running.
As I've stated before, I'm much more concerned about the artificial intelligence (AI) side of SpaceX's business, and the incredible rate at which it's burning cash. (S&P estimates more than $50 billion in negative free cash flow this year, for example -- and twice that next year.) Until that changes, I've honestly got zero interest in investing in SpaceX per se.
But that doesn't mean there's no other way to profit from this Louisiana SpaceX project.
A better way to make money off of SpaceX I refer, of course, to the two companies we now know will be profiting directly from SpaceX's project in Louisiana by selling SpaceX the rocket fuel it needs for its Starships: Exxon and Cheniere.
Unlike SpaceX, Cheniere stock is profitable, generating $2.9 billion in generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP) earnings and $2.8 billion in positive free cash flow (FCF) during the past 12 months. Likewise, Exxon -- on an even grander scale. During the past 12 months, Exxon earned $32.8 billion and generated $30.6 billion in FCF.
In terms of valuation, both Cheniere and Exxon stocks trade at about 20 times earnings and 21 times FCF. Of the two, I'm inclined to prefer Exxon over Cheniere for its lighter debt load (relative to both market capitalization and earnings), as well as its superior dividend yield of 2.6% -- triple Cheniere's 0.8% dividend yield.
Both stocks, though, stand to benefit mightily from an increase in liquefied natural gas purchases by SpaceX as it constructs Starbase Louisiana -- and both look to me like better bargains than SpaceX stock itself.
At first blush, there's nothing connecting the businesses of Space Exploration Technology (SPCX +0.45%) and Hershey (HSY -1.25%). One makes spacecraft, AI technology, and operates the Starlink satellite telecommunications network. The other makes candy bars. But when you dig into the ownership structure, you start to see the connection. Here's what you can learn about SpaceX from Hershey.
Who has the biggest voice at a company? The CEO is likely to have the most influence on a business, but there are limitations. That's because the CEO actually works for the board of directors. And the board of directors is hired by the shareholders. So, if anything really big is going to take place, such as a merger or acquisition, the largest shareholders will have an important say. In the case of consumer staples maker Hershey, the largest shareholder is The Hershey Foundation.
Image source: The White House.
The Hershey Foundation has said no to multiple takeover offers. The foundation uses the dividends it collects from owning Hershey stock to support its philanthropic endeavors, so it is acting to protect the reliable income stream it receives. That may or may not be in the best interest of shareholders, noting that a buyout could lead to a sizable capital gain. But the real takeaway is that Hershey is beholden to The Hershey Foundation in important ways, as the foundation controls 80% of the company's voting power.
Elon Musk controls 48.4% of SpaceX's voting power. That's not as much control as The Hershey Foundation has at Hershey, but it is close enough to 50.1% to give him effective control over all decisions. Add in that he's the CEO, and Musk's position of power gets even stronger. If you own SpaceX, you are effectively investing alongside Elon Musk. What he wants to do is almost certainly going to get done. Mergers, acquisitions, and major capital investments are his to decide because it would be hard, if not impossible, for the board or shareholders to muster the votes needed to oppose Musk.
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I'm happy with Hershey. Are you happy with SpaceX? The real takeaway here isn't about Musk's control. It is to understand the implications of that control. I happily own Hershey stock because I'm a dividend investor looking to own a reliable income stock for the long term; I'm not looking for quick gains from mergers and takeovers. I believe my goals are well aligned with those of The Hershey Foundation.
Elon Musk's ownership in SpaceX is only a problem if you don't think he should have that much power to control the company. If you think giving Musk a free hand to do what he wants is a good idea, then you'll likely see his 48.4% stake as a reason to buy the stock.
Elon Musk has delivered massive multibagger gains for long-term Tesla shareholders, though the stock is down by more than 20% so far this year. The question for many is whether he can do the same for Space Exploration Technologies (SPCX +0.45%) shareholders. After making its debut earlier this summer, SpaceX has become a battleground stock, with some investors thinking the $1.85 trillion market cap company will be worth trillions more in years to come, while others think it is grossly overvalued.
Which team is right? Here is what a $5,000 investment in SpaceX stock today could be worth by 2030.
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Growing AI revenues The company's name might be SpaceX, but its future hinges on its massive investments in artificial intelligence (AI). Since it acquired xAI (which, it should be noted, was also controlled by Musk) early this year for $250 billion, SpaceX has embarked on a massive build-out of data centers for AI infrastructure. This will allow it to meet its own needs for the Grok chatbot and sell computing power to third parties.
Its AI revenue was $2.5 billion last quarter, up from $737 million a year earlier. Capital expenditures for SpaceX's AI segment totaled $15.8 billion in the second quarter alone, a massive amount that it hopes will translate into revenue growth in the near future. It has signed deals to supply computing power to the likes of Alphabet and Anthropi, and on the Q2 conference call, Musk said he believes SpaceX is on pace to reach $100 billion in annual recurring revenue by the end of this year. By 2030, he expects SpaceX's total revenue to reach $1 trillion.
While I would be skeptical that its AI business can go from basically zero to $1 trillion in revenue within five years, there is clearly strong demand for compute capacity, which is why SpaceX is spending so aggressively to build it.
Image source: Getty Images.
Don't forget about Starlink AI is not the only part of the SpaceX business growing quickly. There is Starlink, its satellite internet connectivity platform, which is supported by SpaceX's own launch business.
Starlink revenue was $4.3 billion last quarter, up 65% year over year. New versions of the Starlink satellites are being built, and it will soon begin launching them into orbit, where they will hopefully enable direct-to-device connections with smartphones. This gives SpaceX a huge addressable market to pursue, and it wouldn't be surprising if the segment generated $100 billion in revenue by 2030 if the bull case plays out.
Still, there are competitors in this sector, including aggressive investors Amazon and AST SpaceMobile. Starlink is the leader today, but it is unlikely that SpaceX will monopolize the skies.
Where will SpaceX stock be in 2030? To determine where SpaceX stock may be in 2030, we need to consider its current market cap of $1.85 trillion, and a share count that is likely to be boosted by further secondary stock offerings and employee stock-based compensation in the coming years, diluting the current shares' value.
Over the last 12 months, SpaceX's revenue was just $21 billion. This is going to grow quickly over the next few years, possibly surpassing $100 billion in the near future, simply because of its aggressive capital spending plans for AI infrastructure that can generate computing power for sale. But the target of hitting $1 trillion in annual sales -- something no company has ever achieved -- by 2030 feels far-fetched. You also have to ask how profitable it will be to lease compute after supply eventually grows to meet demand.
A hypothetical SpaceX with $500 billion in revenue and a 20% profit margin would have $100 billion in earnings. If the company's market cap stayed essentially flat at $1.85 trillion over those years, that would give it a price-to-earnings ratio (P/E) of 18.5 five years in the future. This may look like an attractive valuation compared to the average for the S&P 500 index, which trades at a P/E of 30 today. However, that figure is based on an extremely optimistic scenario about potential earnings five years in the future for a highly capital-intensive business. In that light, I'd suggest that an investment made in SpaceX today is likely to be worth a lot less in 2030. I'd predict that SpaceX stock should trade around $100 five years from now, which would leave a $5,000 position opened at $140 per share worth about $3,571.
For years, investors could only guess how much money Space Exploration Technologies (SPCX +0.45%) was making. Now, they finally have an answer.
SpaceX has reported its first quarterly results as a public company, giving investors an unprecedented look at the financial performance of one of the world's most ambitious businesses.
And the numbers are hard to ignore. Revenue nearly doubled from a year earlier. Starlink continued to add customers at a remarkable pace. The company is already generating billions of dollars from businesses beyond rocket launches.
So, after its first earnings report, is SpaceX stock a buy? I think investors should focus on three things.
Image source: Getty Images.
SpaceX is already a growth machine The first takeaway is simple: SpaceX is no longer just a futuristic story. It's already a large and rapidly growing business.
SpaceX generated $7.8 billion of revenue in the second quarter, up 92% from a year earlier. Adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization (EBITDA) jumped 191% to $3.5 billion, while its net loss narrowed to $541 million.
Those are extraordinary growth rates for a company of this size. More importantly, the growth isn't coming from a single product.
SpaceX still operates a rocket launch business. But Starlink, its internet connectivity business, has become an increasingly important part of the company, while its artificial intelligence business is already generating billions of dollars in revenue.
That's an important distinction. Investors aren't buying a company that promises to build the future someday. SpaceX is already building and monetizing parts of that future.
And that's why the first earnings report matters. It gives investors something they didn't have before: financial evidence that the SpaceX machine is working.
Starlink could be the secret weapon Of all the numbers in the earnings report, I'd pay particular attention to Starlink.
The satellite internet business generated $4.3 billion of revenue in the quarter, up 66% from a year earlier. Its subscriber base reached roughly 12 million, about twice the level from a year ago.
But subscriber growth isn't the only interesting part. Starlink generated approximately $1.66 billion of operating income. That's what gets my attention.
Starlink isn't simply another exciting project that requires SpaceX to keep pouring money into it. It's becoming a profit engine.
Think about what that could mean. SpaceX can take the cash generated by Starlink and reinvest it into more satellites, rockets, and infrastructure. Those investments can expand Starlink's network and potentially allow it to serve more customers. More customers can produce more revenue and cash flow. That creates a potentially powerful flywheel.
In other words, Starlink gives SpaceX something many moonshot companies don't have -- a rapidly growing business that can help fund the moonshots. That could prove enormously valuable as the company pursues its ambitions.
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The stock price is the problem Here's where the investment case gets harder.
SpaceX's stock, as of this writing, trades at about $140, giving it a valuation of roughly $1.9 trillion. That's an extraordinary valuation, considering its latest revenue of $7.8 billion.
In other words, investors aren't paying $1.9 trillion for today's SpaceX. They're paying for tomorrow's SpaceX.
They're paying for continued Starlink growth. They're paying for the successful development of Starship -- SpaceX's next-generation rocket. They're paying for the company's rapidly expanding AI ambitions and for markets that may not even exist at a meaningful scale today.
That's why I wouldn't look at SpaceX's 92% revenue growth and conclude that the stock is cheap. It isn't. Great businesses can still be poor investments when expectations get too high.
At this valuation, SpaceX has to deliver more than impressive growth. It has to deliver years of extraordinary growth and eventually convert that growth into substantially higher free cash flow.
So, should investors buy SpaceX? After its first earnings report, I'm more interested in SpaceX than I was before.
The company is growing at an extraordinary rate. Starlink is becoming a meaningful profit generator. And, perhaps most importantly, SpaceX is demonstrating that it can turn ambitious technology into businesses with real customers and real revenue.
But I wouldn't chase the stock simply because the numbers look impressive. The market already knows SpaceX is special. The question is whether it can become far more valuable than even today's enormous expectations suggest.
For that reason, I'd rather buy SpaceX during periods of weakness than at any price. A disappointing Starship test, slower Starlink subscriber growth, or concerns about the company's enormous capital spending could all cause the market to rethink its expectations.
Those moments may create better opportunities for long-term investors.
Space Exploration Technologies (SPCX +0.45%) stock has been on a wild ride.
After debuting at $135 a share, it surged to roughly $225 before falling to around $105. It has since recovered to about $140 (as of this writing). That's a remarkable swing for a company whose long-term story hasn't changed dramatically in just a few weeks. So, what's going on?
I think three things explain most of the volatility: Expectations have gotten ahead of reality, SpaceX's enormous spending has raised new questions, and investors are increasingly focused on Starship.
Image source: Getty Images.
Expectations got ahead of reality The first problem was simply how quickly enthusiasm built around the stock. SpaceX went public with enormous investor interest. That's hardly surprising. Few companies have a combination of technological ambition, growth, and Elon Musk's track record.
But excitement can become dangerous when it gets embedded in the share price. SpaceX quickly climbed from its $135 IPO price to roughly $225. To put that into perspective, the market capitalization at the peak was close to $3 trillion, making it one of the five largest companies on the planet.
At that level, investors weren't merely betting that SpaceX would execute well. They were betting it would execute exceptionally well. That's an important distinction. When a stock is priced for near-perfect execution, even excellent results can disappoint if they aren't quite good enough.
And SpaceX's first earnings report provided a perfect example. Revenue jumped 92% year over year to approximately $7.8 billion. That's fantastic. Still, it didn't stop the stock from correcting by more than 50% from its peak at one point.
But investors also discovered just how much money SpaceX is spending to build its future, which brings us to the second issue.
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SpaceX is spending billions to build the future SpaceX spent approximately $18.4 billion on capital expenditures during the second quarter. Put that number in perspective. The company generated $7.8 billion of revenue while spending more than twice that amount on capital investment. The vast majority went toward AI infrastructure, accounting for $15.8 billion. That's an enormous bet. But it isn't necessarily a bad one.
SpaceX's AI-related revenue surged 247% year over year to approximately $2.6 billion. The company also turned the AI segment's adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization (EBITDA) positive during the quarter. In other words, SpaceX isn't simply spending billions on an idea with no customers. It's building infrastructure for a rapidly growing business.
The only question left is whether that spending will generate attractive returns. That's the part investors don't know yet, and should keep a close eye on.
Starship has become a major catalyst Then there's Starship. If you're new to SpaceX, here's what you need to know.
Starship is SpaceX's next-generation rocket system, designed to be fully reusable and capable of carrying far more cargo into orbit than its existing Falcon rockets. For perspective, the tech company puts 2,500 tons of mass into orbit per year via Falcon. But with Starship, it aims to deliver well over 1 million tons per year and probably ultimately 10 million tons per year.
The idea is simple. SpaceX wants Starship to make launching things into space dramatically cheaper, making many of SpaceX's future businesses more economical.
More Starlink satellites. Larger satellite networks. More commercial launches. More government missions. And potentially entirely new businesses built around cheap access to orbit. That's why Starship isn't simply another rocket in SpaceX's product lineup. It could become the infrastructure underneath SpaceX's next chapter of growth.
But there's a catch. Starship is still under development. That means every successful test can increase investor confidence, while delays or technical setbacks can have the opposite effect.
What should investors make of the volatility? I don't think the recent decline means the SpaceX story is broken. If anything, the volatility is telling us something useful. The market is beginning to separate SpaceX's incredible potential from the price investors are willing to pay. That's healthy.
At roughly $225, expectations were extraordinarily high. At around $140, investors are paying considerably less for the same long-term vision. But that doesn't automatically make the stock cheap. SpaceX is still valued at roughly $1.9 trillion, against a quarterly revenue of less than $8 billion. That's a valuation that demands extraordinary execution.
For long-term investors, I'd therefore pay less attention to the day-to-day stock price and more attention to three things: first, SpaceX's overall growth and profitability; second, the returns SpaceX generates on its enormous AI investments; and third, the progress of Starship.
If all three continue moving in the right direction, the recent volatility could eventually look like nothing more than noise. But if one of them starts moving materially in the wrong direction, the stock could face enormous pressure.
OpenAI said late Friday that it plans to stop providing AI models to Cursor, the coding-tool company now owned by Elon Musk’s SpaceX, marking a further escalation in the bitter rivalry between OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Musk.
Musk and Altman have been at odds for years, a feud that culminated earlier this year in a trial over Musk’s $150 billion lawsuit against OpenAI. During the trial, Musk’s lawyer said that Musk and other witnesses had testified that Altman was a liar, while OpenAI argued that Musk had sought control of the company.
“We are making this choice because we cannot be confident that SpaceX will use our technology within our terms of service, based on our experience with Elon Musk’s companies violating contracts,” OpenAI said in a blog post.
OpenAI said late Friday that it plans to stop providing AI models to Cursor REUTERS Musk responded early on Saturday in an X post, writing, “I couldn’t care less.”
He accused Altman and OpenAI President Greg Brockman of being “untrustworthy,” while repeating his assertion that they “stole an open source nonprofit.”
Musk, the world’s richest person, had sued OpenAI and Altman for “stealing a charity” by betraying the company’s original nonprofit mission for their own enrichment. A federal jury ruled against Musk earlier this year, finding that he had filed the case too late.
However, Michael Truell, a co-founder of Cursor and now an executive at SpaceX, said on X that the company was speaking with the OpenAI team to resolve this issue.
“I couldn’t care less,” Musk posted on X early Saturday. Getty Images Hours after OpenAI’s announcement, Anthropic, which rivals both firms but has an ongoing partnership with SpaceX, said it planned to increase compute to support Claude models in Cursor, according to Tom Brown, one of the co-founders of the firm.
In its blog post, OpenAI said that X, formerly known as Twitter and now part of SpaceX, had breached the terms of its contract with OpenAI after Musk acquired the platform.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, above, and Elon Musk have been at odds for years. Getty Images “To work with a large partner like SpaceX, we typically rely on custom contracts to ensure compliance with our terms of service and that the integration provides for safety at scale,” the AI company added.
The ChatGPT-maker said it proposed a shutoff date of Nov. 12, adding that its agreement with Cursor gave it a limited time window to cancel the contract following “a change of control.”
SpaceX announced a deal to buy Anysphere, the startup behind Cursor, for $60 billion in an all-stock deal in June, and completed the acquisition earlier this month.
Despite a choppy start to the month, August proved to be a strong month for SpaceX (NASDAQ: SPCX) stock, as it saw the equity break the preceding downtrend and rally 30.57% from $108.38 at the July 31 close to $141.50 at the latest close.
SpaceX stock price one-month chart. Source: Google Under the circumstances, investors who estimated that the initial SPCX upsurge would not last and instead waited for the subsequent correction, thus investing $1,000 in Elon Musk’s newer public company on August 1, would have seen substantial gains.
Specifically, such a purchase would have led to $305.70 in profits and a position worth $1,305.70 at the most recent close, and $298.67 in gains and a SpaceX portfolio worth $1,298.67 at press time in the August 31 pre-market.
Simultaneously, investors who correctly identified that $104.83 reached just ahead of the company’s first-ever earnings report represented a likely period low would have enjoyed a 34.27% upsurge and would have seen $1,000 turn into $1,342.70.
Lastly, those who were impressed by the SpaceX earnings report and took the following correction to $108.27 as a buy signal would have accrued $299.99 in profits.
SpaceX stock remains well below its launch prices Meanwhile, despite the notable recovery through August and the quarterly filing showing significant growth relative to the first quarter (Q1) and 2025, SPCX shares’ performance remains middling relative to the initial public offering (IPO).
Indeed, though the equity, at $140.75, remains 4.26% above the IPO price of $135, acquiring SpaceX shares at launch was relatively difficult due to high demand and low float.
Furthermore, SPCX remains 6.17% below its first-ever – June 12 – open at $150 and 12.56% below $160.95 at the closing bell of the same day.
What is next for SpaceX stock? Looking ahead, on the other hand, hints that the relative stagnation in the second half of August might just be a temporary slowdown ahead of the next rally.
Institutional confidence in SpaceX stock remains strong, with Wall Street expecting, on average, that the equity will rise to $226.26 in the next 12 months. Under the circumstances, $1,000 invested at the start of August 2026 could turn into $2,087.66 by the same month in 2027.
Additionally, should the most optimistic price target – the estimate that SpaceX will rocket to $800 – prove correct, the profit could amount to $6,381.44.
Wall Street predicts SpaceX stock price in 12 months. Source: TradingView Elsewhere, it is also noteworthy that the highly bullish predictions for SPCX shares have been met with significant skepticism.
Not only would the Street’s high 12-month forecast mean that SpaceX hit a market cap above $10 trillion just one year after the IPO, but some critics have pointed out that many of the institutions behind the price targets have a vested interest in maintaining good relations with Elon Musk.
The notion that the optimistic predictions might have more to do with a desire to keep the world’s first trillionaire in a good mood than with scrupulous analysis of the equity is lent additional credence by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) weakening regulations meant to prevent such actions in late 2025.
Indeed, Morningstar – a company with no discernible interest in overestimating SpaceX stock prospects – estimated SPCX shares’ fair value at roughly $70 shortly before the IPO.
August has been more than positive for SpaceX (NASDAQ:SPCX) stock, its shares gaining 30% and climbing back above the initial public offering price (IPO). Now, another potential short-term growth catalyst emerges in the shape of the September 9 SpaceX share unlock, when the free float is set to reach 17.7%.
The debut placed about 639 million shares into public circulation, so the scheduled unlocks are significantly increasing the stock’s tradable supply. While we can’t tell for certain how investors are going to react to the supply changes, new shares entering the market can potentially impact the SpaceX price.
In this context, we asked OpenAI’s chatbot, ChatGPT, to predict SpaceX stock price after the September 9 share unlock.
ChatGPT says SpaceX stock will hit this price by September 9 Analyzing the price, ChatGPT described three scenarios for September 9. In the most likely one, the chatbot sees SpaceX shares trading somewhere between $120 and $145, with the most narrow range between $125 and $135 immediately after the unlock. The narrowest prediction implies a 4.4%-12.8% upside from the current price of $141.
If selling is absorbed, the price might go up to $140-$150. A more bullish range of $145-$170 only has a 25% chance of becoming reality, but it is nonetheless notable that the algorithm argued that such a rally is more likely than a bearish correction to the $100-$120 range. What’s more, it argued that a drop below $100 was only 5% likely to happen.
ChatGPT predicts SpaceX stock price after September 9 SPCX share unlock. Source: Finbold and ChatGPT Overall, ChatGPT said that the September 9 unlock is expected to make another 319 million SpaceX shares tradable (2.44% of shares outstanding), followed by another 59 million affiliate shares on September 10.
At around $141, the chatbot expects some of the selling pressure to be priced in ahead of September 9. The key downside risk is profit-taking by early shareholders, while strong SpaceX fundamentals could provide support.
Featured image via Shutterstock
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Elon Musk said building parts in-house would allow SpaceX to accelerate natural gas turbines coming online by up to 18 months. Fabrice Coffrini / AFP via Getty Images SpaceX is building a gas turbine blade factory as it grapples with a global scramble to secure energy supplies for AI data centers.
Elon Musk said on Saturday that the rocket company will manufacture its own gas turbine parts, adding that solar power alone would not be enough to power its massive AI infrastructure buildout.
In a post on X, Musk wrote that SpaceX and Tesla were both racing to build their own massive solar panel factories "as fast as possible" — but added that this would not be enough to meet surging demand for electricity.
"Natural gas will still be needed to supplement and bootstrap solar for several years," Musk said, adding that SpaceX would seek to build its own gas turbine blades and vanes — which are notoriously difficult to manufacture — to speed up production.
"By doing in-house casting at SpaceX, we can accelerate natural gas turbines coming online by up to 18 months, which is a profound game-changer," the billionaire said.
The Information first reported on SpaceX's plans. SpaceX has also begun advertising roles for a "blades and vanes foundry" in Bastrop, Texas, where the rocket company manufactures its Starlink terminals.
"Power generation poses one of the key challenges that could slow the worldwide adoption of AI," read one of the job descriptions.
The AI boom has led to a massive buildout of data centers across the US, which in turn has put electricity supplies under strain and sparked a nationwide public backlash.
Some AI companies have attempted to address their data center's hunger for power by building natural gas power plants.
OpenAI, Amazon, and Microsoft have all struck partnerships to power data centers with natural gas, while Meta's "Hyperion" data center in northern Louisiana will require 10 new gas power plants to supply it with electricity.
The rush to secure natural gas generators has sparked a global shortage of gas turbines and pushed some aerospace startups to repurpose their jet engines into turbines to fuel AI data centers.
SpaceX has used mobile gas turbines to power its Colossus data centers in Mississippi and Tennessee, where they have attracted local complaints over noise and pollution.
Like many other tech giants, SpaceX is spending aggressively on building new data centers and securing AI compute as it seeks to build ever more powerful AI models.
The company spent $16 billion on AI infrastructure in the second quarter of 2026, with executives telling investors to expect "very similar" levels of spending for the next two quarters.
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Space Exploration Technologies (SPCX +0.45%) stock has had a great run in August. After starting out strong following its June IPO, then pulling back sharply in July, it's on the rise again. If you had the foresight to pick up shares on Aug. 1, you're up by nearly 30%. That's an incredible run in a short time frame, and pushed it to around $138 per share -- just above its $135 IPO price, though still well below its first-day opening price of $150.
But is the rally essentially over for now?
Let's take a look at what caused SpaceX to rebound, and consider if it's still worth buying here.
Image source: The Motley Fool.
SpaceX's Q2 results created some buzz Heading into August, there were two primary concerns surrounding SpaceX's stock: what its Q2 results would look like, and how the end of its first insider lockup period would impact the share price.
Two days after that quarterly report was delivered, most insiders who owned shares prior to the IPO were free to start selling up to 20% of their shares. That about doubled the float for SpaceX.
The concern was that the market would be flooded with heavy selling pressure from insiders cashing out, which would crater the stock price.
However, while there was a spike in trading volume coinciding with the ending of that lockup period, it really hasn't had much sustained effect on trading volumes.
SPCX Volume data by YCharts.
Another smaller tranche of shares was unlocked on Aug. 20, and more lockup periods will end over the next year. Those upcoming events could still prove this thesis right, but the first increase in the float proved not to be a big deal in terms of its impact on the share price.
SpaceX also crushed its Q2 results. Revenue grew at an impressive 92% pace, and its net loss was only $541 million, which looks puny compared to the $100 billion in cash it has on hand after its IPO funding raise and the $25 billion bond sale it conducted a few weeks later. SpaceX's artificial intelligence business saw incredible growth, with revenue rising from $818 million in the prior-year period to $2.56 billion in Q2. Revenues from the connectivity segment (which primarily consists of its Starlink satellite internet service) increased from $3.25 billion to $4.29 billion, and its space business remained the smallest segment, increasing from $619 million to $962 million.
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This shows once again that SpaceX currently isn't primarily a space stock; its business is more AI- and connectivity-focused right now. That's the lens I'm viewing the stock through, and if it maintains these growth rates for a while, it may become a strong business.
However, I'm still a bit skeptical about SpaceX's current valuation. If we value the stock based on full-year revenue estimates, it trades at 41 times sales -- an expensive valuation for any company. While some investors may be willing to pay that kind of premium, I'm not. I'll be waiting until SpaceX's business grows into its valuation or the stock declines to better reflect that underlying business. (Of course, those things may never happen, and I could miss out.)
Ultimately, because there is so much hoped-for growth already priced into the stock, there's just too much risk relative to the reward potential that remains. I think most investors would be better off staying patient at least until SpaceX has its initial year of trading under its belt.
SpaceX (SPCX +0.45%) may be a rocketship company, but its stock price performance has been more like an amusement park ride for its early investors. Elon Musk's brainchild hit the market at $135 per share in June 2026 -- quickly surging to an all-time high of $225.64 within days before dropping back to its IPO price as of the time of writing.
The company's operating results have also changed rapidly as booming AI-infrastructure-driven growth makes its sky-high valuation more palatable. Let's dig deeper into the pros and cons of SpaceX to decide what a $1,000 investment might be worth by next year.
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Second-quarter earnings changed the narrative Before its IPO, it was hard to see why Wall Street was so excited about SpaceX. According to data from private market research company Sacra, revenue growth had decelerated from a rate of 100% year over year in 2022 to just 18% year over year by 2025. And the recent acquisition of xAI looked like a desperate attempt to distract investors from this alarming slowdown in the company's core space industrial operations.
That said, SpaceX's second-quarter earnings turned this thesis on its head. The results were nothing short of explosive, with revenue growth rebounding to 92% year over year to $7.8 billion, driven mainly by the company's AI segment, which involves revenue related to its vast array of cutting-edge computing infrastructure and frontier AI model Grok.
Furthermore, the momentum looks set to continue in the near term as SpaceX continues to accumulate vast quantities of data center infrastructure to rent out to other tech companies. Recent deals include an agreement with Anthropic to provide up to 300 megawatts of compute capacity from the SpaceX Colossus facility in Tennessee. The two companies are also working together to study the feasibility of orbiting (space-based data centers) in the future, but this looks highly speculative.
Google has also agreed to pay SpaceX an eye-popping $920 million per month for access to 110,000 Nvidia graphics processing units (GPUs) along with other AI infrastructure between October of this year through June 2029, with the potential for either party to terminate if desired.
Can the boom last for the long haul?
Image source: Getty Images.
SpaceX has created a compelling niche for itself in the AI industry by leveraging its massive colossus data centers to serve shortages in the market for computer infrastructure. But while second-quarter earnings indicate that this is a huge near-term growth opportunity, there is no guarantee that business will remain so elevated over the long haul.
The first concern is the economic moat. For decades, SpaceX has centered itself around its cutting-edge rockets and satellite internet technology that few companies can hope to rival. However, AI infrastructure is a much newer and more competitive opportunity, and it is unclear whether SpaceX has any lasting advantages over its competitors. Orbiting data centers look decades away (if they are even possible) and could be beset by space debris, extreme temperatures, and maintenance issues.
On Earth, SpaceX will compete with established hyperscalers that boast enormous amounts of capital, infrastructure, and expertise. And it will be very expensive to keep up. Investors are already getting nervous about the company's soaring capital expenditures (which totaled $18.4 billion in the second quarter alone). And this spending will have to rise if SpaceX wants to reach the levels of companies like Amazon, which expects to spend $220 billion in 2026 alone (roughly $55 billion per quarter).
What will a $1,000 invested in SpaceX be worth by 2027? SpaceX's soaring AI business helps alleviate earlier fears that the company's days of explosive growth were behind it. That said, with a price-to-sales (P/S) multiple of 64, the company will need to maintain this extremely high growth rate for years to justify its current price tag. And that's far from guaranteed.
So what will a $1,000 position in SpaceX be worth by the end of 2027? Probably around the same as it is now until investors get more reassured about the company's long-term economic moat in the AI infrastructure opportunity. The stock remains a hold until more information becomes available.
Space Exploration Technologies (SPCX +0.45%) has gotten a lot of attention from investors since it went public in June.
Elon Musk's space company is poised to be the most disruptive company in history, according to bulls, as it's already transformed space flight, and over the long term, it aims to colonize space and make human civilization interplanetary. Additionally, the company says it has identified a $27 trillion addressable market, primarily made up of AI applications.
SpaceX is investing heavily in AI following its merger with xAI, Musk's AI company, earlier this year, and the company is aiming to scale its AI compute to 10 gigawatts (GW) by the end of 2027, which is enough to power roughly 7.5 million American homes continuously.
Clearly, the company has big ambitions, but it also has a huge valuation, trading at 64 times sales, and analysts only expect the company to be barely profitable this year, forecasting $0.09 in earnings per share for the year.
After going public in June, SpaceX initially shot out of the gate, but the stock has since cooled off and is now roughly flat from its IPO price.
SpaceX's unique business model and Elon Musk's track record with Tesla have made it intriguing to investors, but the stock's sky-high valuation and its seemingly far-fetched goal of space colonization offer reasons to be cautious.
For investors, there's another stock that offers the upside potential of SpaceX without the downside risk. That's Nvidia (NVDA -4.58%), which has become increasingly connected to SpaceX in recent months.
Nvidia needs no introduction at this point. The AI chip juggernaut is now the most valuable company in the world, coming off a 9% surge on its earnings report after CEO Jensen Huang said next year would grow by at least 70%, compared to analyst expectations of 45%.
But Nvidia's strength alone doesn't adequately explain why it's an ideal substitute for a SpaceX investment. There's more to the story than that.
Image source: Getty Images.
The Nvidia-SpaceX connection SpaceX may be best known for its reusable rockets or its Starlink satellite internet service, but since its merger with xAI, the company has been increasingly focused on AI, which it sees as the future of the business, including projects like orbital data centers, and that has meant a closer partnership with Nvidia.
On its earnings call, Nvidia said SpaceX was one of its lead partners for the new Vera CPU, which might come as a surprise to investors, as Nvidia's biggest customers have been hyperscalers like Microsoft and AI start-ups like OpenAI.
Elon Musk also cemented the relationship between the two companies when he said that SpaceX would build exclusively on Nvidia, adding that the new Vera Rubin architecture was the best AI computing system available.
By forming an exclusive relationship with Nvidia, SpaceX gains preferential treatment, including early access to new products, and the two companies are also working on some products together, such as a space-optimized Vera Rubin NVL72 system for orbit.
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Why Nvidia is a better buy than SpaceX Nvidia is coming off a quarter in which revenue grew 106%, adding roughly $50 billion in new sales in the quarter. The company continues to dominate the data center GPU market and has held firm against rising competition from rivals like AMD and Intel, as well as from its customers, who are developing their own chips. That resilience is a testament to the superiority of Nvidia's technology.
The biggest risk facing Nvidia seems to be that the AI boom will turn into a bubble. The stock is being priced as if its current profit trajectory isn't sustainable and that profits will eventually fall, as the stock trades at just 18 times next year's earnings per share, and EPS estimates are likely to go up after Huang called for 70% growth next year.
If the AI boom does go bust, however, SpaceX stock looks much more vulnerable than Nvidia. Yes, SpaceX still has the space and connectivity businesses, but it's staking its future on AI as the massive ramp to 10 GW shows. Its valuation is also much higher than Nvidia, putting it at a much greater risk of a crash.
Nvidia, on the other hand, is priced as if its profit growth will flatline after next year.
Because SpaceX is building on Nvidia chips, Nvidia will benefit from SpaceX's success, but the gap in valuation, as well as Nvidia's proven track record, significantly favors the chip-maker over SpaceX. Nvidia much higher floor than SpaceX, and potentially a higher ceiling, thanks to its leadership in AI chips.
SpaceX is initiated at a Buy, citing accelerating growth, narrowing operating losses, and a dominant position in space infrastructure. Q2 revenues surged 91.94% YoY to $7.814 billion, with all segments showing strong growth and management projecting $100 billion ARR by December. Valuation concerns are mitigated by a 2029 P/E of 21.39x, robust market share, and resilient stock performance post-lockup expiration.
Space Exploration Technologies Corp. (NASDAQ:SPCX) CEO Elon Musk says that the commercial spaceflight company could exceed $3 trillion in revenue by 2033.
User DogeDesigner took to the social media platform X, sharing an investor note by investment bank Morgan Stanley (NYSE:MS) stating that SpaceX was “attractively valued” and that investors were underestimating Starship’s scale.
The note also said that SpaceX could conduct 5,800 Starship launches annually from eight launch pads and report $3.5 trillion in revenue by 2040.
The post was quoted by investment firm Mach 33‘s CEO Aaron Burnett, who said that the Morgan Stanley estimate was “based on a number that’s almost half of the company’s stated goal and 10 years later than the company is targeting to achieve it.”
Responding to Burnett, Musk touted his own prediction for SpaceX. “My best guess for ~$3.5T revenue is roughly around 2033 fwiw,” the billionaire said. Notably, Musk had earlier predicted that SpaceX would reach $1 trillion in revenue by 2030.
Elon Musk’s Galaxy VisionEarlier, the CEO said that Starbase, Louisiana, which is scheduled to begin construction in 2027 and is targeting its first Starship launch by 2029, would enable Tesla Inc.‘s (NASDAQ:TSLA) Optimus humanoid robot to become the first-ever "Von Neumann" machine.
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Musk then said that the developments undertaken by SpaceX would help the "expansion of civilization throughout the galaxy and reaching K3."
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SpaceX is also targeting to launch Starship 10,000 times annually by 2030, following President Donald Trump‘s new space policy that aims to increase NASA’s launch cadence. Musk had also said that Starship’s upcoming Flight Test 14 would attempt to catch the rocket’s upper stage.
Price Action: SPCX slipped 0.27% to $140.49 during overnight trading on Thursday.
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This has been a history-packed year in several respects. We've watched the Dow Jones Industrial Average, S&P 500, and Nasdaq Composite rally to new highs and welcomed a new Fed chair for only the 17th time in the central bank's 113-year history.
But perhaps the most profound moment of 2026, thus far, has been Space Exploration Technologies' (SpaceX) (SPCX +0.45%) initial public offering (IPO). Elon Musk's SpaceX raised $85.7 billion from its debut, including the underwriters' overallotment, nearly tripling the previous largest-ever IPO cash raise. But SpaceX may not hold its crown for much longer, courtesy of artificial intelligence (AI) start-up, Anthropic.
Image source: Getty Images.
Anthropic's IPO may top $2 trillion According to prediction markets, Kalshi and Polymarket, investors believe there's a greater likelihood that Anthropic will surpass SpaceX as the largest IPO of 2026.
As of Aug. 26, traders on Polymarket placed a 63% chance of Anthropic topping SpaceX, the latter of which was valued at $1.77 trillion when it priced approximately 555.6 million shares at $135 each. To put this into perspective, Polymarket's traders assigned almost no chance of Anthropic unseating SpaceX four weeks ago.
JUST IN: Anthropic has overtaken SpaceX as the favorite to be 2026's largest IPO by market cap.
63% chance. pic.twitter.com/TKGKiYMUMD
-- Polymarket Money (@PolymarketMoney) August 26, 2026 If you're wondering what happened over the last four weeks, look no further than the latest sales update. According to Bloomberg, the developer of the Claude large language model has seen its annual run rate sales catapult from around $9 billion at the end of 2025 to $65 billion by the end of July.
Anthropic has several high-profile, recurring clients, including social media maven Meta Platforms and software kingpin Microsoft, among others. It's also backed by some well-known investors, including Amazon and Alphabet, whose stakes in Anthropic total approximately 21% and 14%, respectively.
Unfortunately, AI start-up Anthropic, which may target up to a $2 trillion valuation, faces many of the same historical headwinds as SpaceX.
Image source: Getty Images.
Chasing after hot IPOs rarely works out for retail investors Arguably, the biggest question mark for Anthropic, which carries over from SpaceX's IPO less than three months ago, is how to justify its stratospheric valuation.
When SpaceX debuted, it was trading at north of 100 times its reported 2025 full-year sales. History shows that no company at the forefront of a game-changing technological trend has sustained a price-to-sales ratio above 30 over an extended period. Even based on its annual run rate sales, Anthropic would fall firmly in this historical bubble territory.
Speaking of bubbles, we've yet to see any game-changing technology over the last three decades avoid an early stage bubble-bursting event. These bubbles eventually burst because investors persistently overestimate the pace of adoption and/or optimization of new technologies. While spending on AI infrastructure is off the charts, we're likely several years away from businesses optimizing AI solutions.
Lastly, history teaches us that chasing hot tech-driven IPOs rarely works in retail investors' favor.
Moral of the story-do NOT chase hot IPOs
Year-1 average drawdown = 55%
Year-1 median drawdown = 54%
Table: Truist pic.twitter.com/xt864JD4Xh
-- Puru Saxena (@saxena_puru) June 3, 2026 According to data gathered by Trust Financial, the average year-one max drawdown for the 30 hottest tech-driven IPOs over the last 14 years is 55%! Thus far, SpaceX's peak-to-trough drawdown from its post-debut high is 54%! While retail investor buzz surrounding IPOs can be otherworldly, it rarely lasts more than a few weeks.
Even though prediction markets expect Anthropic to rewrite Wall Street's history books, retail investors would be wise to keep their distance.
Sean Williams has positions in Alphabet, Amazon, and Meta Platforms. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Alphabet, Amazon, Meta Platforms, Microsoft, and Truist Financial. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.
It's no Berkshire Hathaway -- at least not yet. But Nvidia (NVDA -4.58%) has for some years been taking a page out of the Warren Buffett playbook and investing some of its considerable cash hoard in the stock market.
Today, the company has $63.4 billion invested in stocks, representing a big chunk of its overall cash position of $80.6 billion. And according to a newly released Securities and Exchange Commission filing, that portfolio includes a major new stake in Elon Musk's Space Exploration Technologies (SPCX +0.45%), known as SpaceX.
Here's why this is a bold move for Nvidia and one big reason why CEO Jensen Huang likes the company so much.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang. Image source: Nvidia.
Nvidia's portfolio is growing fast At the end of March, Nvidia reported just $18.4 billion in stock holdings. More than half of the total was in the form of a $9.5 billion stake in rival chipmaker Intel. That means, in just one quarter, its portfolio of investments in public companies grew by $45 billion, or about 250%, even as the S&P 500 (^GSPC -0.25%) grew by just 14.9%. How is that possible?
Well, for one thing, Intel's stock took off, rising by 216.4% during Q2. That grew Nvidia's stake from $9.5 billion to a jaw-dropping $30 billion, and accounted for nearly half of the increase.
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The other half was thanks to its $21 billion stake in SpaceX. Nvidia bought 122.7 million shares of the space launch and AI company. Together with a $4.5 billion increase in Nvidia's Nebius holdings, Nvidia put $25.5 billion in new money into its holdings, which accounted for about half of the portfolio's value increase.
That means 75% of Nvidia's portfolio is now concentrated in just two stocks: Intel (44.2% of the portfolio's value) and SpaceX (30.9%). Its other six holdings each represent single-digit percentages. Clearly, the Intel stake has paid off handsomely. SpaceX, on the other hand, is now trading at about $139 per share -- just above the $135 IPO price, and below its first trading price of $150 per share.
Why would Nvidia make such a big investment in a company widely thought to be overvalued?
Image source: The Motley Fool.
Huang and Musk's mutual admiration Both Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk have been highly complimentary of one another in the past.
On SpaceX's most recent earnings call, Musk sang the praises of Nvidia's products:
Going forward, we've decided to build exclusively on Nvidia because we think the Vera Rubin architecture is the best. We think it's the best AI computer, and we greatly value our close cooperation and partnership on many levels with Nvidia. So, we're exclusive to Nvidia.
For his part, Huang has also heaped praise on SpaceX's Grok chatbot and Tesla's vehicles, calling them "world-class" and referring to Musk as an "extraordinary engineer." In describing how Musk retains large amounts of information across multiple disciplines in his head, Huang even called Musk "the ultimate GPU."
Huang has also expressed gratitude for Musk's early support of Nvidia's first AI-focused system, the DGX-1. "When I announced DGX-1, nobody in the world wanted it," he told podcast host Joe Rogan, "Except for Elon."
Given that Nvidia is now the world's primary provider of AI computer infrastructure, it's no wonder that Huang is happy to repay Musk's confidence in kind by green-lighting a major SpaceX stake.
Space Exploration Technologies (SPCX +0.45%) began as a wager that rockets could be reused, launching into orbit could be cheap, and a private-sector business might be the vessel that carries civilization beyond a single planet.
While this origin story still sits at the center of the company's mission, SpaceX has changed some of its broader ambitions. Before its historic IPO, SpaceX absorbed xAI and subsequently folded rockets, Starlink, X (formerly Twitter), and a frontier generative AI model (Grok) into one vertically integrated moonshot. SpaceX CEO Elon Musk explained the rationale for this structure in a post on X: "You don't seem to understand that SpaceX will be worth more than the rest of Earth if we accomplish our goals."
This sentence is either a generational prophecy or hubristic salesmanship. Investors now have to decide which.
Image source: Getty Images.
A full analysis of the SpaceX IPO When SpaceX opened on the Nasdaq in early June, shares came in at $150. By the end of its opening-day session, SpaceX boasted a market capitalization of $2.1 trillion -- immediately propelling it among the ranks of the world's most valuable companies.
The aftermath of SpaceX's debut has been less ceremonial. The stock peaked at $225.64 just four days following the IPO but has spent most of the summer learning how gravity works. By late July, shares dipped as low as $108 -- wiping out more than $1 trillion from SpaceX's market value. As of this writing (Aug. 26), SpaceX stock is changing hands around $138 -- essentially in line with the offering price of $135.
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Measuring SpaceX's books against the worth of the planet To be blunt, SpaceX's financial profile makes Musk's commentary look like a category error. In 2025, the company generated $18.7 billion in total revenue while incurring a $4.9 billion loss. While connectivity, led by Starlink, generated $11.4 billion in revenue and $4.4 billion in operating income, it was the only segment in the black.
The first half of 2026 has only accelerated the same pattern. Revenue in the first quarter was about $4.7 billion against a $4.3 billion net loss. The second quarter showed modest improvements across the board. Revenue surged 92% year over year to $7.8 billion, while net losses narrowed to $541 million.
The theme is that Starlink has become a real cash engine, but Starship and artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure are enormous cash drains. Simply put, a company generating low-$20 billion of annual revenue, still burning cash, and spending like a sovereign enterprise is not, by any conventional methodology, a candidate to outvalue Earth. To close the gap, I think SpaceX would need to compound on three things simultaneously.
First, Starship would need to become so reliable and cheap that it makes space exploration a more recurring business. Second, Starlink has to continue scaling across consumer, enterprise, aviation, and maritime markets and would likely also need to enter telecommunications services -- all without compressing its average revenue per user (ARPU) into a commodity ditch. Lastly, SpaceX's AI capacity business needs to prove it can turn orbital compute from a slogan into legitimate contracted revenue that enterprise customers pay for at lucrative unit economics.
How should investors view an investment in SpaceX? In my view, Starlink is worth owning in the ordinary sense: It has found product-market fit as evidenced by a growing subscriber base generating a healthy operating profit. The rest of SpaceX's equity story, however, is vulnerable to Musk's duration risk. Corporate governance is highly concentrated in Musk's voting power, while ballooning capital expenditures (capex) on emerging -- and somewhat still unproven -- businesses can overwhelm the cash war chest from the company's record listing.
In essence, a flailing Starship cadence or an uninspiring AI build-out that never recoups its cost of capital would leave SpaceX investors with nothing more than a premium-priced telecom-and-launch conglomerate, not a game-changing civilization utility.
Becoming the most valuable company in history could be imaginable if Orbital Compute actually works and reusable rockets collapse the cost of putting AI workloads into space. However, it is not the base case for a money-losing business generating just tens of billions of sales. At the end of the day, outvaluing Earth is not an investable forecast. Rather, it is a mission statement disguised as a price target.
The real takeaway is narrower and more harsh. SpaceX indeed offers a legitimate industrial complex with one profitable growth engine and two enormous call options attached.
With this in mind, I think SpaceX stock is only worth a position for investors who can stomach volatile drawdowns, tolerate a founder who has a history of answering questions with cosmology, and accept that shares could easily spend years looking expensive relative to its underlying books.
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Space Exploration Technologies Corp. (NASDAQ:SPCX) has redefined the launch business, flying at a pace no other company has matched. The company recently completed its 100th Falcon mission of 2026 following a record of 165 Falcon launches in 2025, underscoring its dominance in orbital launch services.
Yet Firefly Aerospace Inc. (NASDAQ:FLY) CEO Jason Kim says the commercial space industry faces a different challenge. In an exclusive email interview with Benzinga, Kim said demand for launch services is outpacing the industry’s available rocket capacity.
Firefly CEO Says Demand Is Growing Faster Than Launch CapacityAsked about Firefly’s long-term agreement with Lockheed Martin Corp (NYSE:LMT), Kim said the company is seeing strong demand across national security, commercial and civil space markets.
“The launch market is expanding rapidly across national security, space exploration, and commercial sectors,” he said. “Customers need to get to space when and where their mission demands—not months or years down the road.” He added that “demand for government and commercial constellations and missions outstrips the rocket capacity available, both in the U.S. and globally.”
Kim’s comments stop short of suggesting that any single launch provider is unable to meet demand. Instead, they point to a broader industry dynamic: as governments deploy more national security payloads and companies build larger satellite constellations, the need for launch services is expanding alongside the number of available rockets.
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Firefly Is Scaling Production to Capture a Growing MarketKim said Firefly is responding by increasing production of its Alpha launch vehicle. According to the CEO, the company is expanding automated composite manufacturing, improving engine production efficiency and increasing overall throughput to support more launches.
Those investments reflect Firefly’s view that launch demand will remain robust even as SpaceX continues to increase its own flight cadence. While SpaceX has dramatically expanded industry capacity through reusable rockets, Kim argues the broader market is also growing rapidly, creating opportunities for additional launch providers that can reliably deliver missions on customers’ schedules.
That interpretation is consistent with his comments about industry-wide supply constraints rather than a direct critique of any competitor.
For investors, the key question is no longer whether launch activity is growing—it clearly is. The issue to watch is whether the industry’s launch capacity can keep pace with rising demand from commercial satellite operators, civil space programs, and defense customers.
If Kim’s assessment proves correct, companies that can steadily increase reliable launch availability could benefit even in a market led by a dominant player like SpaceX.
His estimate reaches the milestone seven years before Morgan Stanley. Summary
$3.5T revenue estimate
SpaceX (SPCX, Financials) CEO Elon Musk thinks the business could hit a stunning revenue milestone way earlier than Wall Street expected. Musk estimates that SpaceX will be generating about $3.5 trillion a year by around 2033.
That is seven years before Morgan Stanley's projection, which reaches nearly the same number in 2040. The bank's study is premised on a massive increase in Starship activity, maybe thousands of launches a year.
Musk has predicted before that by 2030, SpaceX might be bringing in approximately $1 trillion a year.
Notably, the recent $3.5 trillion amount is Musk's own estimate, not business direction. SpaceX has not put a formal long-range revenue projection out at that level.
Yet the contrast between Musk and Morgan Stanley indicates just how much growth SpaceX's creator expects Starship to achieve.
Last month, SpaceX announced plans for a $100 billion Louisiana launch complex as the corporation pursues Starlink and bigger goals for space infrastructure.
The question for investors is no longer whether Musk intends SpaceX to be huge. It's how fast the corporation can translate the potential scalability of Starship into actual income.
Disclosures I/we have no positions in any stocks mentioned, and have no plans to buy any new positions in the stocks mentioned within the next 72 hours.
Despite the optimistic claims ahead of the initial public offering (IPO) and the subsequent bullish forecasts, investing in SpaceX (NASDAQ: SPCX) stock as soon as it became available would not have been a lucrative move by press time on August 28.
SpaceX (NASDAQ: SPCX) delivered robust Q2 results, with 92% revenue growth to $7.8B, adjusted EBITDA nearly tripling, and Starlink subscribers doubling to 12M. SPCX's Connectivity segment is highly profitable, while AI showed rapid growth but demands unprecedented CapEx, driving free cash outflow to ~$25B in H1 2026. Management targets a December 2026 annualized revenue run rate above $100B, but execution risk is high given aggressive CapEx plans and ambitious guidance.
@Stockstotrade's Tim Bohen remains bullish on AI, calling it the “greatest invention in the history of mankind,” and sees more room to run for CrowdStrike (CRWD), SpaceX (SPCX) and Palantir (PLTR). Tim joins Alex Coffey and Rick Ducat to break down price action in all three stock charts.
