The largest initial public offering (IPO) is in the books with Space Exploration Technologies Corp (SPCX 1.70%), also known as SpaceX, officially beginning trading last month. There are, however, a couple of highly anticipated IPOs still expected to come this year, including OpenAI and Anthropic, two big players in artificial intelligence (AI).
Both companies are expected to go public in the near future, and while there's no word on when OpenAI's stock might begin trading, Anthropic's IPO could be coming soon, potentially by October. Could it be a great buying opportunity, and will it do better than SpaceX?
Image source: Getty Images.
Anthropic is meeting with investors, suggesting the company is moving closer to its IPO According to a CNBC report, Anthropic has been scheduling meetings with investors, a sign it is getting closer to its highly anticipated stock offering. However, the IPO may still be a few months away, with Bloomberg projecting it may not be available until October. But a date hasn't been formally announced, nor is the S-1 filing available yet, which details the company's financial results and growth opportunities.
Anthropic is known for its Claude AI models, which are highly popular with coders. It was most recently valued at $965 billion, all but ensuring it'll hit the market at a much lower valuation than SpaceX, which reached a $2 trillion market cap on its first day of trading.
SpaceX has been able to drive a high value despite incurring losses totaling nearly $5 billion last year. The big question mark around Anthropic is whether its losses will be as big or if the company is much closer to profitability. Those details, however, won't be available until the S-1 filing is released, which should be closer to the IPO.
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SpaceX's stock did well on its first day, but it has been falling in recent weeks, under the weight of its massive valuation. Anthropic is likely to be more modestly valued, but its growth prospects will also not be nearly as massive or promising as those of SpaceX, which is pursuing opportunities not only in space but also in AI and the telecom sector. Thus, the AI stock may still look expensive in relation to its overall size.
Anthropic may encounter similar challenges to SpaceX, given that its valuation is likely to be rich out of the gate, which could impact its early returns, and that's why I don't think it'll do a whole lot better than SpaceX, if at all.
Shares of Space Exploration Technologies Corp (SPCX +0.39%) have been in a tailspin of late. The rocket company, which is also eyeing massive opportunities in artificial intelligence (AI), initially soared when its shares began trading last month, but the rally has since cooled significantly. Last week, the stock fell to below its IPO price of $135, closing at just under $124 on Friday.
Will the stock, which is more commonly known as just SpaceX, continue to fall, or is it likely to bounce back? Here's where I think it's headed.
Image source: Getty Images.
Why SpaceX's stock could finish the year below $100 SpaceX, for all its hype, is a grossly overvalued stock that's based primarily on rosy expectations of future growth rather than strong fundamentals. That's a big risk, particularly in a market that looks as frothy as this one. Although the stock's initial gains were promising and at one point it looked like its valuation could rise above $3 trillion, a pullback was highly likely. In fact, it's come sooner than I expected.
However, even today, with the stock's value falling, its market cap remains extremely high at $1.6 trillion. This is, after all, a business that generated $19 billion in sales last year and incurred a net loss of more than $4.9 billion. Those are not the kinds of numbers you'd expect from a business at this type of valuation. Momentum and excitement can drive a stock's value higher, but it's unlikely to last long.
As lockups on SpaceX's stock begin expiring later this year, insiders may have a strong incentive to sell their shares, given the company's inflated valuation. Thus, there may be more downward pressure on the stock in the near future. This is why I don't think it's a huge stretch to expect the stock to trade far lower this year, and why it may finish the year below $100.
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Buying SpaceX stock today is a big gamble If SpaceX can put data centers in space and help send humans to Mars, its valuation could skyrocket. The problem with its growth story is that it's based on exceptionally high hopes, and the person leading the business, Elon Musk, is known for making rosy forecasts and setting expectations high, only to often fall short in one way or another.
High expectations combined with poor financials could doom SpaceX stock to fall further in both the short and long term, which is why I'd stay far away from it.
HomeInvestingStocksOutside the BoxOutside the BoxThe hidden danger of chasing hyped initial public offerings? Skipping the fine print.July 20, 2026, 10:21 a.m. ET
Not long ago, I was at a dinner where a guest described the lengths they had gone to in pursuit of SpaceX shares SPCX. They searched for venture funds that happened to own the company. They looked for former employees willing to sell. They explored secondary marketplaces where shares traded at eye-watering premiums. They tried to get into a co-invest. They asked custodians if there was any way to source stock at IPO. Each path led to another dead end or another markup they shied away from.
SpaceX shares continued their decline on Monday, falling about 1.25% to around $122. The stock remained well below its $135 initial public offering price.
After having to abort its launch on July 16, Space Exploration Technologies Corp (SPCX +0.64%) has rescheduled its 13th test flight for Starship to Thursday, July 23.
Starship is the company’s heavy-lift, fully reusable rocket that SpaceX has invested over $15 billion in so far.
The rocket is key to the company’s thesis, which hinges on SpaceX being able to launch super-heavy payloads into orbit with quick turnaround times.
With the stock struggling as of late, the market will be paying close attention to the upcoming test flight. Here’s what investors need to know.
Image source: Getty Images.
What the test flight will seek to accomplishStarship’s 13th test flight is looking to perform similar objectives as previous test flights, specifically “a successful launch, ascent, stage separation, boostback burn, and landing burn at an offshore landing point in the Gulf of America,” according to the company.
Furthermore, the company has made changes to Starship’s hardware and software to correct issues that occurred on test flight 12.
SpaceX has altered the startup sequence, so Starship can better change directions. Test flight 12 had some issues with its directional flip, which was off by roughly 90 degrees.
Last Thursday, as Starship prepared for its 13th test flight, an automated abort command got triggered after four of the ship’s 33 engines failed to ignite, according to Reuters.
On X, SpaceX Founder Elon Musk wrote that the company is planning to replace two of the Raptor engines on Starship’s boosters.
Everything hinges on StarshipThe market did not respond well to the launch abort last week, erasing $100 billion of market cap that day, despite setbacks on test flights not being all that uncommon.
But it shows just how crucial Starship is to SpaceX’s future.
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A massive part of SpaceX’s total addressable market and therefore valuation has to do with the company’s artificial intelligence unit, which is heavily focused on launching orbital data centers that can gobble up significant AI compute market share.
In SpaceX’s registration statement, the company says that Starship’s fully-reusable rocket is designed to carry 100 metric tons to Earth’s orbit “while enabling rapid turnaround times akin to commercial aviation,” with future Starship models designed to double capacity.
The company also expects Starship to begin orbital payload delivery by the second half of this year, with orbital AI compute satellites to be deployed as earlI as 2028. it’s hard to know how close Starship is to getting to this point.
That said, having Starship be so important to the thesis could turn out to be a tailwind if SpaceX proves the bears wrong.
"If this is how the market reacts to a precautionary abort, I can't wait to see how it responds to a successful flight," Space Capital CEO Chad Anderson told Reuters, adding that he views the company as a long-term opportunity. "Zoom out and none of this changes the thesis: we're in the early innings of a multi-decade infrastructure cycle, and Starship is the centerpiece."
Anderson may very well be right, but no one can say with certainty whether Starship will work as expected, stick to the company’s timeline, or be able to turnaround missions like a typical airline.
This in my view makes SpaceX stock a big gamble, especially given it’s already massive valuation.
I don’t think it’s bad to take a smaller, more speculative position, given the company’s potential, but I see making the stock a large position as too risky right now.
The aerospace market is reaching new heights as Space Exploration Technologies (SPCX 2.60%) and Archer Aviation (ACHR +8.78%) race to revolutionize how humans move through the atmosphere and beyond.
SpaceX is an established leader in reusable rockets and satellite connectivity, while Archer focuses on short distance urban air mobility. Both companies represent ambitious bets on the future of flight, making them compelling options for investors looking to gain exposure to long term technological shifts in transportation.
SpaceX designs and operates reusable rockets, the Starship vehicle, and the Starlink satellite broadband network. It aims to build integrated connectivity and artificial intelligence infrastructure for Earth and beyond. While the company serves a wide range of government and commercial clients, specific customer concentration details are not disclosed in public filings.
In FY 2025, revenue reached nearly $18.7 billion, an increase of approximately 33% from the $14 billion reported in the previous year. Despite this top-line growth, the company reported a net loss of nearly $5 billion for the fiscal year. This performance reflects the massive capital requirements for building out the global Starlink network and developing next-generation heavy-lift rockets.
As of its December 2025 balance sheet, the current ratio is approximately 1.4x, indicating the company maintains sufficient short-term assets to cover its immediate liabilities. Free cash flow, calculated as cash flow from operations minus capital expenditures, was about negative $14 billion in FY 2025. Note that stock-based compensation (SBC) accounted for roughly 28.7% of operating cash flow, inflating reported cash generation, since SBC is a non-cash expense added back in the cash flow statement.
The case for Archer AviationArcher Aviation develops electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) aircraft for commercial and military use. This growth among industrial stocks is anchored by an agreement with United Airlines Holdings (UAL +0.51%) providing for the conditional purchase of up to $1.0 billion in Midnight aircraft. The company also partners with the U.S. Air Force and Stellantis (STLA +0.26%) for manufacturing support.
In FY 2025, Archer Aviation reported revenue of $300,000. This early-stage revenue was accompanied by a net loss of approximately $618.2 million. This reflects a company still in its pre-commercial phase as it pursues aircraft type and production certification.
As of its December 2025 balance sheet, the debt-to-equity ratio is roughly 0.1x. This ratio measures total debt, including short- and long-term obligations, against shareholders' equity, with a lower number indicating less reliance on borrowed money. Free cash flow was negative at $511.7 million, representing the cash remaining after operating and capital spending are covered.
Risk profile comparisonSpaceX operates in a technically complex environment where launch failures or mission delays can result in significant financial setbacks. The company faces stiff competition from established aerospace giants like The Boeing Co (BA 1.70%) and Lockheed Martin (LMT +0.77%). Rapidly evolving regulations regarding satellite constellations and space debris also pose potential hurdles for its Starlink division.
Archer Aviation faces significant regulatory and certification risks, as it must secure final approvals from the FAA before launching commercial flights. The company has incurred over $2.3 billion in losses since its inception and requires substantial capital to scale its manufacturing and infrastructure. It also faces intense competition from Joby Aviation (JOBY 0.41%) and must navigate ongoing legal proceedings regarding trade secrets.
Valuation comparisonNeither is projected to make a profit in the coming 12 months, while Space Exploration Technologies maintains a lower valuation relative to its current sales.
MetricSpace Exploration TechnologiesArcher AviationSector BenchmarkForward P/En/an/a240.6xP/S ratio84.0x1,590xn/aSector benchmark uses the SPDR XLI sector ETF.
Valuation metrics sourced from Financial Modeling Prep (FMP) and may differ from other data providers.
Which stock would I buy in 2026?SpaceX's various businesses intend to leverage the company's core launch capabilities, starting with reusable rockets. The ability to reuse boosters significantly lowers per-launch costs and spreads fixed manufacturing costs across multiple missions. Expectations are that scaling up quickly will happen, with Wall Street analysts projecting $39 billion in sales for fiscal 2026 with a much lower net loss, around $1.6 billion, and move into profitability in 2027.
The lack of free cash flow appears to be crushing; however, projections indicate free cash flow will be negative $28 billion this year, then jump to negative $67 billion in 2027.
Still, the success of Tesla Inc (TSLA 1.12%) has made founder Elon Musk the richest man in the world and raised expectations that he can make an even greater fortune from SpaceX, as Space Exploration Technologies Corp is known. The business certainly has market support behind it, raising the world’s largest IPO, $85.7 billion this year.
Turning to Archer Aviation, the federal government created the framework last year for real-world testing of eVTOL aircraft, a concrete step toward making Archer's vision a reality. Japan, South Korea, and Saudi Arabia are other countries building similar regulatory frameworks. A lot still has to happen for Archer’s aircraft to get into the skies, but the notion that the nation's airspace is being regulated in a way that is holding back growth is one that has found favor.
Archer is taking steps to refurbish a small Los Angeles airport for use as its testing grounds and is working to scale up its manufacturing capabilities to eventually reach capacity for 50 planes a year. Management has an initial plan to focus on military and cargo uses for its plane, which would be an easier path to early revenue. Future estimates are speculative, but Wall Street analysts see Archer turning its first profit in 2030, with $2.3 billion in revenue, but a lot has to go right between now and then.
Both businesses have big aspirations. SpaceX, however, has a very real business in Starlink, which mitigates the possibility that grander plans won’t come to fruition. Meanwhile, the aviation industry has shown there are few competitive moats, and Archer comes at a very high P/S multiple. For 2026, SpaceX is the stock to seek profits with.
As Space Exploration Technologies Corp. (NASDAQ: SPCX) stock dropped below its IPO (initial public offering) price, Finbold AI Agent – an advanced financial assistance tool – has made a bold prediction for SpaceX stock.
On July 20, the Finbold AI Agent predicted that SpaceX stock would decline by an average of 4.8% by August 1. As August 1 falls on a Saturday, the forecast places SPCX at approximately $118 at the close on Friday, July 31.
SPCX stock forecast. Source: Finbold The Finbold AI Agent leveraged 5 Large Language Models (LLMs), including DeepSeek Chat, Gemini 3.5 Flash, Claude Sonnet 5, GPT-5.7, and Grok 4.5. The AI’s SpaceX stock price forecast for the next 12 days is bearish, possibly due to the post IPO sell-off.
Despite investors pouring $320 million into SpaceX stock in July so far, the shares have declined by over 21%. As a result, SpaceX’s market capitalization has declined by over $1.3 trillion from its all-time high in recent weeks, with the company now valued at approximately $1.6 trillion at the time of reporting.
SPCX stock price chart. Source: Finbold. Wall Street remains bullish on SpaceX stock Despite the bearish outlook for SPCX stock from AI, Wall Street analysts remain bullish on the company over the long term. Precisely, 29 Wall Street analysts surveyed by TipRanks have initiated an average Strong Buy for SPCX shares.
SPCX stock price forecast. Source: TipRanks As such, these analysts have set an average 12-month price target of $243.81 for SpaceX, signaling a possible 96.6% upside. Ahead of the planned 13th test flight for the company’s Starship as early as July 23, Douglas Harned, an analyst from Bernstein, reiterated a Buy rating due to its transformative impact on long-term growth.
Consequently, if more investors continue to buy SpaceX stock due to its robust fundamentals, the midterm bearish forecast could be invalidated, and vice versa.
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SpaceX (NASDAQ: SPCX) stock has undergone a sharp reversal just weeks after completing the largest IPO in history, raising questions about whether the pullback presents a buying opportunity or signals further downside.
After debuting at $135 per share in June 2026 and rallying to a post-IPO high of about $226, SpaceX stock has fallen to $124 as of press time.
The decline of roughly 45% from its peak has pushed shares below their IPO price and wiped nearly $1 trillion from the company’s market value, reducing its valuation from about $2.6 trillion to $1.6 trillion.
SPCX 30-day stock price chart. Source: Finbold Why SpaceX stock plunged post-IPO The sell-off reflects a common post-IPO pattern, with early enthusiasm giving way to profit-taking, insider selling, and valuation concerns.
Additional pressure has come from share unlocks, rising short interest, a recent Starship testing setback, and a broader pullback in speculative technology stocks. Even so, SpaceX remains among the world’s most valuable public companies.
The strongest case for buying SpaceX stock is Starlink, the company’s primary revenue and profit driver.
The satellite broadband service now serves more than 10 million users worldwide, generating recurring, high-margin revenue from consumer, enterprise, and government customers, including Starshield contracts.
Notably, SpaceX generated $18.7 billion in revenue in 2025, up 33% year-over-year, with revenue projected to reach between $22 billion and $30 billion in 2026 if subscriber growth and launch activity remain strong.
While Starlink powers current growth, the long-term investment case largely depends on the success of Starship.
The next-generation rocket could significantly reduce launch costs if development stays on track. A successful rollout would support faster satellite deployments, in-orbit refueling, lunar missions, and new opportunities such as orbital data centers.
However, Starship remains in testing and faces execution risks. Technical setbacks, regulatory challenges, or development delays could weigh on investor sentiment and future growth prospects.
As a result, upcoming Starship flight tests may be more important than short-term stock movements in shaping SpaceX’s long-term valuation.
Is SpaceX a buy? Whether SpaceX stock is a buy at current levels largely depends on an investor’s time horizon.
The 45% decline has reduced some of the valuation excess seen after the IPO, but SpaceX still trades at a premium to many established technology and industrial companies. Even after the sell-off, its valuation remains heavily tied to future growth rather than current profitability.
Although revenue continues to expand, SpaceX reported a net loss of about $4.9 billion in 2025 as it invested heavily in infrastructure, research and development, artificial intelligence initiatives, and Starship development.
Investors bullish on satellite communications, reusable space transportation, and the broader space economy may view the pullback as a more attractive entry point.
More cautious investors may prefer to wait for evidence of sustained profitability, successful Starship milestones, and the completion of major share unlock events.
Key near-term catalysts include earnings results, Starlink subscriber growth, and Starship test flights. Strong execution could improve sentiment, while operational setbacks or insider selling may keep the stock volatile.
Joining the Nasdaq-100 represents a big milestone, as it includes the biggest non-financial companies on the Nasdaq. The idea is, once a company joins, it may see its share price advance as managers of funds tracking this index buy shares -- since their funds must mimic the index's performance, they have to make these additions.
The Nasdaq-100 rebalances annually to remove certain members and add new ones, and it also may add members at other points in the year. And this brings me to the reason why the Nasdaq-100 has drawn attention in recent times. The index adjusted its admission rules to allow companies in sooner after their market launches than ever before -- and that resulted in Space Exploration Technologies (SPCX 5.41%) joining the Nasdaq-100 earlier this month.
So now, with SpaceX newly in the index, investors may be wondering: What happens to stocks after joining the benchmark? History has a clear answer.
Image source: Getty Images.
An Elon Musk-led company So, first, a note about SpaceX. The company, a giant in rocket launches, satellite-based connectivity, and artificial intelligence (AI), has drawn great attention from investors due to this dynamic mix of businesses. And some investors also like the idea of being involved in a business led by Elon Musk. Also at the helm of electric vehicle giant Tesla, he's known for his commitment to innovation.
SpaceX's IPO, the world's largest, was massively oversubscribed, and the stock rose right out of the gate, gaining 67% from the IPO price of $135 to a peak of $225 on June 16. And the company's trillion-dollar valuation helped it land a spot on the Nasdaq-100 on July 7, about 15 days after its launch as part of the index's new "fast track" rules. Prior to this, a company had to wait at least three months for inclusion.
So far, the Nasdaq-100 addition hasn't brought SpaceX lasting gains. The stock has declined from its peak, and as of the July 17 market close, SpaceX traded at $123.99, significantly below its IPO price.
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New additions to the Nasdaq-100 For some clues about what may happen next, let's turn to history. We'll consider some of the new additions to the index over the past three years and their performances in the two months following their entrance.
As we can see, six out of 10 stocks advanced during this time period. But in the case of Seagate Technology and Western Digital, we can't attribute the movement to entrance in the index: Both companies are involved in the booming AI memory and storage businesses, and stocks in the industry have soared this year.
So history offers us a clear answer: While a stock may see a bit of upward momentum around the time of its addition to the index, it's generally limited in size and duration. In some cases, it's hardly even noticeable.
SpaceX has echoed this, advancing slightly right after the addition. But then the stock plummeted in the days to follow.
SPCX data by YCharts
Look to earnings What does this mean for you as an investor? A stock's entry into a particular index isn't a reason to add that player to your portfolio. It's great that a company is acknowledged as a giant of the times, but this doesn't necessarily make it a fantastic investment. Instead, investors should look to the company's earnings track record, or if the company isn't yet profitable, consider its path to profitability: Does it have a clear roadmap and goals that are attainable? And it's important to consider your own investment style too.
For example, SpaceX isn't yet profitable, and some of its biggest goals rely on technology that hasn't yet been proven -- if the company reaches its goals, it may be a smashing success, but along the way, the stock carries a significant amount of risk. So, while SpaceX may be appropriate for a very aggressive investor, it's not the best choice for a cautious investor.
History offers us a clear message: Nasdaq-100 membership, while exciting, isn't the key to stock performance. All of this means it's a better idea to turn our attention to the company's -- whether it's SpaceX or another -- next earnings reports and progress toward goals.
There's little doubt that Elon Musk's Space Exploration Technologies (SPCX 5.41%) will remain the biggest and best-known name in the space business for at least the next five years. In terms of performance, though, bigger isn't always better. There's another much smaller space company that's likely to be more rewarding to its shareholders, not despite its size, but because of it.
That company is Rocket Lab (RKLB +0.59%).
Image source: Getty Images.
Rocket Lab in focus If you're not familiar with it, it's simple enough. Rocket Lab makes reusable orbital launch vehicles. In other words, rockets. Its flagship product/service right now is a relatively small rocket -- called Electron -- that's capable of putting up to 660 pounds worth of payload into low Earth orbit. And it's now been launched 91 times, deploying over 260 satellites.
The company's thinking bigger, though. While still in the testing stage, Rocket Lab's Neutron rocket, expected to begin its initial flights near the end of this year, can lift up to 14 tons worth of cargo, or even launch missions to Mars. With this sort of medium-lift potential, Rocket Lab will be competing with some of SpaceX's launch capabilities.
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In the meantime, the company also provides satellite components and can even help companies design and build this orbiting equipment.
Ready to outperform But can Rocket Lab actually beat massive SpaceX at its own game?
Probably not. However, that's not quite the question investors are asking. What most investors want to know is how the two stocks will perform compared to one another for the foreseeable future.
That's where recently IPO'd and richly valued SpaceX shares face a distinct disadvantage. Like most other initial public offerings, this one is likely to founder for at least a year (if not more) while the market digests the fact that the $1.6 trillion behemoth isn't likely to justify this market cap with actual earnings anytime soon.
For perspective, SpaceX generated just under $19 billion in revenue last year, with the bulk of that coming from artificial intelligence rather than space-launch services or satellite-based broadband service Starlink.
Granted, that's the market where Musk expects most of the growth opportunity to take shape. SpaceX's IPO prospectus suggests there's $26.5 trillion in AI business up for grabs in the foreseeable future.
The only problem? It's not clear where he's getting the number, nor is there a time frame attached to it.
There's also the not-so-small matter that the AI business is already a crowded one, with powerhouses like Alphabet and Microsoft capable of keeping SpaceX's artificial intelligence efforts in check. It would take a sizable chunk of this potential revenue to justify SpaceX's value, and there's no guarantee it will produce it.
One thing is for sure. There's not enough future revenue on the table for Starlink or space launches alone to justify SPCX stock's present price, never mind the company's complexity and subsequent lack of focus.
Meanwhile, shares of tightly focused companies have been more than halved since their May peak, mostly to make room for SpaceX's arrival to the publicly traded market. This only adds to the potential rebound stemming from this year's expected year-over-year revenue growth of 53%.
Space Exploration Technologies (SPCX 5.43%) completed its landmark initial public offering (IPO) on June 12. Investor enthusiasm propelled SpaceX stock sharply higher than the IPO price, with shares opening on the Nasdaq around $150 on the first day of trading and closing near $161. The offering valued SpaceX at more than $2 trillion -- making it the largest IPO in history.
Momentum continued briefly as the stock reached an intraday peak of $225.64 just days after the IPO. However, shares have since given back all of those gains and then some.
As of the close of trading on Friday, SpaceX stock was trading at just $123.99. This represents a decline of 45% from its post-listing high, and a drop of 17% from its first-day opening price. Is now a good time to buy the dip in SpaceX stock, or should retail investors who have avoided the volatility so far keep sitting on their hands?
Image source: Getty Images.
What has driven SpaceX's volatility? The initial surge in SpaceX stock reflected powerful, narrative-driven momentum. Investors bought into the company's multipronged vision: expanding the Starlink satellite constellation for global broadband, advancing reusable rocket technology, and exploring ambitious artificial intelligence (AI) applications such as orbital data centers. Elon Musk's personal brand certainly added to the buzz around the stock, drawing both retail and institutional buyers into what felt like a once-in-a-generation opportunity.
Over the last few weeks, the enthusiasm around SpaceX has met countervailing forces. Questions are rising about the company's valuation relative to its fairly modest revenue base and its still-negative earnings profile. Skeptics also note the capital-intensive nature of SpaceX's various businesses and the long timelines that would be required to turn its ambitious plans into businesses capable of delivering consistent revenues and profits.
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Analyzing other notable IPOs in recent history History offers useful context through other high-profile technology IPOs. Snowflake went public in September 2020 at roughly $250 per share. One year later, the stock had climbed by more than 30% amid strong demand for cloud data platforms. Yet the stock later experienced significant volatility and meaningful drawdowns as growth expectations for the company moderated.
Palantir Technologies listed around the same time as Snowflake. That stock also witnessed meaningful appreciation during its first year as investors embraced the potential of the company's data analytics platforms, Foundry and Gotham. Despite periodic swings tied to contract timing and broader market sentiment around its government-heavy operation, Palantir's long-term trajectory has been positive overall.
A more recent example paints a much different picture, however. After Figma's 2025 IPO, the stock climbed to $120 right off the bat. Within nine months, Figma stock had fallen by roughly 79% from its peak levels as competition from AI-native design tools intensified and questions about its profitability surfaced.
These case studies share a common pattern: Large and heavily hyped IPOs often deliver strong initial pops driven by a compelling narrative and a scarcity of available shares. But those are followed by periods of digestion or corrections, particularly after lockup periods expire, the float increases, and execution metrics come into focus.
Where will SpaceX stock trade one year from now? Projecting a stock's trajectory carries enormous uncertainty. Even among the small sample of tech IPOs referenced here, the outcomes varied widely. With that said, I think the early evidence and broader historical tendencies suggest there could be continued pressure on SpaceX shares over the next year.
The post-IPO enthusiasm that initially lifted the stock appears to have faded as investors weigh the company's execution risks amid high expectations, and acknowledge the reality that transformative technologies take time to mature.
Drawing from patterns observed in the IPOs above, I think a reasonable base case sees SpaceX trading near or modestly below its current price by next June, in a range between $110 and $125. The bottom of that range would represent an 11% decline from Friday's closing price. Under these scenarios, a $5,000 investment made now could be worth either about the same as it is today down to as low as roughly $4,400 by mid-2027.
While stronger execution could support a more bullish outcome, the current trajectory of waning excitement suggests that any recovery that's coming may take longer to arrive. But of course, this forecast offers just one plausible path among many.
Space Exploration Technologies (SPCX 5.43%), or SpaceX for short, has been an absolute roller coaster since going public roughly a month ago. Despite the stock rocketing to $225 and then dropping back down to roughly $125, some Wall Street analysts still see big things ahead. Adam Jonas, an analyst overseeing Morgan Stanley's coverage of SpaceX, set his base case for the stock at $300 per share.
That target signals massive upside, more than double the stock's current share price. But such an ambitious price target depends on SpaceX becoming far more than a space stock. It's a bet on unprecedented vertical integration in arguably the world's most significant economic opportunity since the industrial revolution: artificial intelligence (AI).
SpaceX's upside lies in AI more than in space Morgan Stanley expects SpaceX to grow at a breathtaking pace for the foreseeable future. The research assumes that SpaceX's revenue will grow from $18.7 billion in 2025 to $319 billion by 2030 and to $3.3 trillion by 2040. The bulk of that comes from artificial intelligence, where Morgan Stanley is counting on SpaceX building out orbital infrastructure for global connectivity and AI.
Image source: The Motley Fool.
Elon Musk agrees. The company's S-1 filing pegged its total addressable market at approximately $28.5 trillion, with all but $2 trillion of that tied to AI. SpaceX intends to unleash a massive constellation of AI satellites called Starmind, essentially building data centers in orbit. The company hopes to launch its first AI satellites on Starship sometime next year.
Looking at the big picture, rockets are essentially a means to build out SpaceX's AI empire in orbit.
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That upside comes with immense risk Space is truly the next frontier, especially for AI. Data centers have become very controversial in the United States, where citizens have begun pushing back hard. New York recently became the first state to impose a moratorium on new hyperscale data center builds. SpaceX successfully establishing AI infrastructure in space would be a true game changer, as no company currently seems close to replicating that model.
Elon Musk in the White House Oval Office. Image source: The White House.
At the same time, these goals are as risky as they are ambitious. That's even reflected in Morgan Stanley's research, where the bull case is as high as $600 and the bear case as low as $75. The reality is that right now, the stock's valuation reflects a lot of success that hasn't happened yet. SpaceX is trading at about 94 times last year's revenue, even after its recent slide to a $1.7 trillion market cap.
SpaceX will need to live up to Morgan Stanley's growth projections for the stock to sustain its valuation, let alone double in value. As a result, SpaceX will likely remain very volatile as time reveals where the company lands in this wide range of possibilities.
One of the more recent arrivals to our stock market, Space Exploration Technologies (SPCX 5.43%), better known as SpaceX, has never published a quarterly earnings report as a publicly traded company.
That's going to change soon. While the market doesn't yet have a firm date for when the figures for its second quarter ending June 30 might be released, it's reasonable to expect a report in early August. So there's time to consider if it's worth spending $1,000 on the company's stock. I wouldn't be willing, and here's why.
Image source: Getty Images.
Moving in the darkness One of the primary reasons is that SpaceX remains something of a mystery.
Its name is somewhat misleading, since most of its operations aren't directly involved in space exploration. It has a thriving satellite business with Starlink, a high-capex artificial intelligence (AI) unit that builds data centers and manages the X (formerly Twitter) social media platform, as well as a space business.
While the company intends for all these operations to complement each other, SpaceX is at present more of a jumble of activities that don't necessarily synthesize. That, plus the fact that the company's pre-IPO filings don't provide much detail about its finances, makes the second quarter hard to estimate.
This is surely why analyst projections are all over the place. There are many pundits already tracking SpaceX stock; 25 of them are included in the data compiled by Yahoo! Finance, for example. But, unusually for analysts, their estimates don't sit within a relatively narrow range. Their figures for the quarter's revenue have a range of nearly $3 billion -- from $5.3 billion to $8.1 billion.
Those prognosticators seem to agree that the historically loss-making SpaceX will also land in the red in the second quarter. The big question is by how much -- the current net loss estimates range from $0.12 to $0.42.
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Stuck on the launchpad Another element keeping me away from SpaceX is that it's still experiencing setbacks in its headline activity.
Late Thursday afternoon, the company unexpectedly aborted the latest launch of its Starship rocket, after some of its engines apparently failed to start. Uncomfortably, this is the heavy rocket that's supposed to be the launch vehicle helping power the company to astronomical success and glory.
Mission aborts happen, of course, but there's an awful lot of capital betting on that not to occur -- at least, not often -- at SpaceX.
Understandably, the stock fell after the sudden cancellation (SpaceX stock fell 5% in Friday trading). With that decline, $1,000 would buy eight shares of SpaceX.
That's not a huge commitment in the grand scheme of things, but even given that, I'd hold off on investing in this stock. The second quarter is sure to feature plenty of red ink, and the company still has at least one major operational kink to work out. I feel that money has better potential for liftoff in other stocks.
SpaceX (SPCX 5.43%) can't seem to catch a break. On Thursday, the company aborted the second launch attempt of its upgraded Starship rocket moments after ignition, hours after the stock had slid 3% to about $131 -- an all-time low for its brief public life, and below the $135 price at which it went public in June, in an initial public offering (IPO) that raised $85.7 billion.
But a scrubbed launch is a passing headline. The heavier weight on the stock is a calendar item. SpaceX's IPO lockup releases begin in August, and the biggest early tranche could put more shares on the market than the IPO itself did.
Here's how the supply wave works, and what it means for anyone eyeing the beaten-down stock.
Image source: Getty Images.
A supply wave, on a schedule SpaceX's June 12 IPO put less than 5% of the company's roughly 13.2 billion shares into public hands. Nearly everything else is locked up, for now.
The earnings-linked release could come first. Under the lockup terms in SpaceX's IPO prospectus, up to 911.5 million shares become sellable on the second full trading day after the company's first earnings report as a public company (a report the company hasn't formally scheduled yet). That single tranche alone is bigger than the entire IPO, and it is worth more than $115 billion at the current share price.
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Another 455.8 million shares would be released alongside them if the stock closes at least 30% above its IPO price, or $175.50, on five of the 10 trading days running into the report. At about $131 as of this writing, that trigger is nowhere in sight.
And the calendar keeps going. Smaller slices, each about 7% of the shares subject to the standard lockup, unlock roughly every two to three weeks from late August through late October. Another 28% becomes sellable after the company's third-quarter report, and the standard lockup winds down entirely in early December. Elon Musk's own shares stay locked until next June.
What the supply wave means for buyers Lockup expirations matter most when a stock is already weak, because they add supply exactly when demand is shaky. SpaceX fits the description. Shares have fallen about 42% from their post-IPO peak of $225.64.
And the fundamentals give potential sellers reasons. The company's Starlink-driven connectivity segment is a standout. It generated $11.4 billion of revenue and $4.4 billion of operating income in 2025, with segment operating income more than doubling year over year, and it added $3.3 billion of revenue in the first quarter of 2026. But the company's newly acquired artificial intelligence (AI) segment lost $6.4 billion from operations in 2025, and it posted a $2.5 billion operating loss in the first quarter of 2026 alone, and the space segment itself lost money in both periods, too.
Even at its lows, meanwhile, SpaceX carries a market value of about $1.7 trillion. That is nearly 90 times the revenue the business generated over the past 12 months, for a company losing billions of dollars a year.
There's also precedent for lockup pain. Meta Platforms, back when it was known as Facebook, saw its first post-IPO lockup expire in August 2012, freeing about 271 million shares. The stock fell more than 6% that day to what was then an all-time low, roughly half its IPO price. (Facebook, it's worth remembering, turned out fine.)
Of course, there's a counterargument: everyone can see this coming. The lockup schedule has been public since the prospectus, and some of the stock's roughly 35% slide over the past month likely reflects investors selling ahead of the supply. Insiders don't have to sell, either. And with shares at an all-time low, some may prefer to wait.
Still, the setup argues for patience. That first release will show where demand for SpaceX shares actually meets supply, and the tranches that follow will keep testing it into December. If the stock absorbs that first wave without breaking to new lows, that itself could be evidence the selling pressure is already priced in. Investors who believe in the long-term story of Starship, Starlink, and Musk's AI ambitions will get plenty of information over the next several months -- and, quite possibly, plenty of chances to buy.
I wouldn't buy the stock in front of that wave. Personally, I'm content to let the lockups play out before I'd even consider it. The stock's valuation simply looks too expensive anyway, in my opinion.
SpaceX employees gather to watch Booster 20 as it rolls out of the SpaceX production facility for the launch pad as preparations continue for the 13th test flight of the Starship spacecraft... Purchase Licensing Rights, opens new tab Read more
July 19 (Reuters) - SpaceX (SPCX.O), opens new tab is targeting Thursday, July 23, for another attempt to launch its Starship rocket, the company said in a statement on Sunday.
SpaceX CEO Elon Musk posted on X later on Sunday that the next Starship launch would occur on Friday, contradicting the earlier statement from his company. He did not say whether the original Thursday date was wrong.
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On July 16, SpaceX's Starship rocket triggered a last-second abort before liftoff for its 13th flight test from Texas, which erased about $100 billion from the company's market value.
SpaceX said it has modified Starship's propulsion system to address the engine issue experienced on the previous flight.
A launch delay for the $15 billion rocket development program better known for dramatic engineering feats and explosive testing failures is not uncommon.
On Friday, SpaceX said it would attempt the launch on July 20.
The company has launched 12 Starship test flights since 2023.
On its 13th flight test, Starship will carry 20 Starlink satellites to demonstrate its satellite-dispensing system and the Starlink network's laser communication links, but those satellites will follow the ship's suborbital trajectory and burn up in Earth's atmosphere soon after deployment.
In its prospectus, SpaceX said that it aims to launch the first Starlink satellites to orbit on Starship by year's end, followed by routine launches.
Reporting by Gursimran Kaur in Bengaluru; Editing by Matthew Lewis
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles., opens new tab
If you like to keep up with famous investors, you probably know Cathie Wood, the founder, CEO, and chief investment officer of Ark Invest, known for investing in companies with disruptive and innovative technologies. Many investors pay attention when she makes big buys or sales, and she recently raised a lot of eyebrows when she bought $51 million worth of Elon Musk's Space Exploration Technologies (SPCX 5.41%).
The reason many were surprised is that Space Exploration Technologies, commonly known as SpaceX, is arguably overpriced.
Image source: Getty Images.
Why would Cathie Wood invest in SpaceX? Cathie Wood is only human, so maybe she's investing in SpaceX due to FOMO -- the fear of missing out. (That's why many of us make certain investments, sadly.) Her company has actually been investing in SpaceX for a long time, though -- since before it even went public last month.
Another reason could be the company's leadership in space launches and satellite communications. Or maybe Wood and her team are excited about SpaceX's ventures into other realms, such as artificial intelligence compute satellites.
Wood may also think that the stock has now fallen so much that it's unlikely to fall much more.
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Why you might not want to invest in SpaceX The biggest knock against SpaceX's stock, in my opinion, is its valuation. What's its price-to-earnings ratio? Well, it doesn't have one yet, since it hasn't delivered earnings. In such cases, one might look instead at the price-to-sales ratio. It was 65.5 as of mid-July. In case you don't know, that's quite steep. Consider that Apple's (AAPL +0.26%) price-to-sales ratio was recently 11, while Amazon's (AMZN 0.91%) was 3.7. And those companies have earnings!
Plenty of people have been investing in SpaceX, so they are probably reasoning to themselves that the company will eventually grow into its valuation. It certainly could. But that could take years -- in which you might have been invested in another stock. And SpaceX is priced for perfection. Once it shows signs of trouble, investors might flee, sending shares down. In fact, it recently postponed its Starship test flight due to engine issues, and the stock sank more than 5%.
If you like investing with a margin of safety, look elsewhere. If you can stomach a lot of risk and really like what you see in SpaceX, consider investing modestly, perhaps starting with a small position and waiting for a better price before investing more. Indeed, the stock has fallen since its IPO pop and was recently trading below its IPO price. (Specifically, it closed at $124 on July 17, 8% below the IPO price of $135 and 45% below its high of $225.)
Cathie Wood may not expect the stock to keep falling, but I can certainly see it doing so in the near term. After all, despite that 45% drop, the company was recently valued at a whopping $1.6 trillion -- without even having earnings.
Meanwhile, the company's first quarterly earnings report is expected to be released around early August. Whatever it shows might send the stock up or down sharply, so keep that in mind. Remember, too, that there are plenty of other promising tech stocks out there.
SpaceX (SPCX 5.43%), which went public in the biggest IPO in history on June 12, joined the Nasdaq-100 on July 7. That inclusion, driven by Nasdaq's (NDAQ 2.75%) fast-track rules for mega-IPOs, forced its index-based exchange-traded funds (ETFs) to buy the stock.
Yet SpaceX's stock has actually declined 17% since its inclusion in the Nasdaq-100, and it's dropped below its IPO price of $135 per share. Let's see why SpaceX's addition to the index failed to drive its stock higher, and if its post-IPO pullback represents a buying opportunity.
Image source: Getty Images.
Why did SpaceX's stock pull back? SpaceX's stock reached a record intraday high of $225.64 per share on June 16 and closed at its all-time high of $211.39 on the same day. At the time, many investors were still dazzled by its historic IPO and consumed by a fear of missing out (FOMO).
But at its peak, SpaceX's market cap hit $2.66 trillion, or 142 times its 2025 revenue of $18.7 billion. Today, its market cap still hovers at $1.63 trillion, or 87 times last year's revenue.
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Those price-to-sales ratios seem too high for a company that grew its revenue by 33% in 2025. It's also unprofitable, since losses in its space and AI segments (the latter expanded by its hasty acquisition of xAI before its IPO) are erasing Starlink's profits. It will also continue to rely heavily on debt offerings and dilutive acquisitions (like its recent all-stock takeover of the AI coding start-up Cursor) to expand its money-losing AI business.
SpaceX will unlock 20% of its shares held by its employees and early pre-IPO holders on the second trading day after its second-quarter earnings report in late July or early August. If its stock closed at or above $175.50 for at least five of the ten consecutive days before that earnings release, it will unlock another 10%. All of those red flags drove many investors to retreat from SpaceX's stock after its explosive debut.
Does that pullback represent a buying opportunity? Elon Musk claims SpaceX could generate more than $1 trillion in annual revenue by 2030, as it launches Starship (its largest rocket ever), expands Starlink's network, sends more data centers into orbit, and expands its AI infrastructure and services segment. From 2025 to 2028, analysts expect its revenue to grow at a 97% CAGR from $18.5 billion to $141.6 billion.
If you expect SpaceX to achieve that incredible acceleration, then its stock might be worth accumulating as it languishes below its IPO price. But if you think those estimates are too bullish (as they often are), then it might be prudent to wait for lower prices and more realistic long-term estimates.
When SpaceX NASDAQ: SPCX went public just over a month ago, on June 12, it did so as the most hotly anticipated listing in years, and unmistakably as a space company. Rockets, satellites, and Mars ambitions were the story. But barely a month into its life on the public markets, a different narrative is taking hold on Wall Street, and it has far more to do with artificial intelligence (AI) than with space travel.
SpaceX Today
$123.99 -7.12 (-5.43%)
As of 07/17/2026 04:00 PM Eastern
52-Week Range$122.12▼
$225.64Price Target$234.78
The timing is interesting because the stock itself has had a rough start. After hitting a post-IPO high in the sessions following its IPO, SpaceX shares have slumped around 40% and are now trading below the $135 price at which they listed.
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For a company that generated so much excitement coming to market, dipping below the IPO price inside the first few weeks isn’t a great look. Yet beneath that disappointing price action, the emerging investment case may be more compelling than the chart suggests.
Why the AI Narrative Is Taking OverThe core of the argument is Starlink, SpaceX's satellite internet network. On the surface, it's a connectivity business, beaming broadband down to homes, vehicles, and remote corners of the planet. But increasingly, investors are recognizing that a global, low-latency connectivity network is exactly the kind of infrastructure the AI era is going to depend on.
As AI systems become more embedded in everyday devices, vehicles, and industrial applications, the need for reliable connectivity to move data back and forth grows enormously. Starlink is one of the very few networks capable of providing that coverage at scale.
The bulls argue that this could make SpaceX something like an AI infrastructure landlord, with its network and vertical integration allowing it to control data movement and potentially support entirely new compute products over time.
This is a view that Wedbush's Dan Ives has been vocal about for some time. He argues that SpaceX should be seen as much more of a data and AI play than a traditional space company, pointing to the strategic value of its network and the growing data demands flowing through it. If that framing gains wider acceptance, it fundamentally changes the lens through which the company is valued to the upside.
The Speculative Upside, and the Very Real RisksBeyond connectivity, there's an even more ambitious element to the thesis. There has been growing discussion around the potential for data centers in space, using solar power and natural cooling to run compute-intensive AI workloads outside the constraints of terrestrial infrastructure.
Tied to this is the Terafab semiconductor project, which Oppenheimer recently described as “critical” to SpaceX's future valuation, while also cautioning that it remains speculative and carries real execution risk.
That tension sits at the heart of the debate. The upside case is enormous, but it rests on ambitious projects that are far from proven, and the company is burning through significant cash to pursue them. The bears make a fair point that the current valuation already implies extraordinary growth, with no guarantee that the vast AI opportunity translates cleanly into durable, high-margin profits.
What the Analysts Are SayingSpaceX Stock Forecast Today12-Month Stock Price Forecast:
$234.78
89.35% Upside
Moderate Buy
Based on 37 Analyst Ratings
Current Price$123.99High Forecast$800.00Average Forecast$234.78Low Forecast$115.00SpaceX Stock Forecast Details
Despite that rough start, the early analyst coverage suggests the bulls currently outnumber the bears. While Piper Sandler did initiate coverage this week with a cautious Neutral rating, that was a rare outlier versus the likes of Evercore, which gave the stock a Buy rating, one of many in a run of recent bullish analyst calls.
The price targets of some of these recent updates are also hard to ignore, with many clustered around $250, which, from the current level near $130, implies close to 100% upside. Targets like that suggest at least some analysts believe the recent weakness reflects a serious dislocation between the share price and the company's longer-term potential. Especially if the AI infrastructure narrative takes hold, then the current price could look like an entry point in hindsight.
A High-Stakes First Report AwaitsAll of this means SpaceX's first public earnings report, due on Aug. 6, is a pivotal moment. As a newly listed company with no track record of reporting to public markets, this first look under the hood will carry enormous weight in shaping how investors think about the story.
The key will be any commentary that supports the AI infrastructure framing, particularly around Starlink's growth and how management chooses to position the business. Lean into the AI narrative convincingly, and the bulls calling for a doubling of the stock will have real ammunition.
Fall back on a more pie-in-the-sky space story, and that 40% sell-off may prove less an entry point and more a warning. Either way, Aug. 6 should be firmly circled on every investor's calendar.
Should You Invest $1,000 in SpaceX Right Now?Before you consider SpaceX, you'll want to hear this.
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While investors spent the week focused on a brutal sell-off in chip stocks, rocket maker and satellite internet company SpaceX (SPCX 5.41%) quietly kept falling. Shares slid 5.4% on Friday to close at $123.99. That marked a sixth straight daily decline, an all-time closing low for the stock's brief public life, and a level below the $135 price from its June initial public offering (IPO).
The slide has been more of a drip than a crash, which may be why many investors haven't registered it. But the cumulative damage is significant.
Shares peaked at $225.64 shortly after their debut, so the stock has lost about 45% of its value in roughly a month.
So is this newly cheaper SpaceX finally worth buying? I don't think so.
Elon Musk at the White House. Image source: The White House.
Why the stock keeps sliding There hasn't been a single blow. Instead, several pressures have stacked up.
In late June, SpaceX priced $25 billion of senior notes in its first bond offering as a public company. The notes come due between 2031 and 2056, at interest rates running from 5.35% to 6.65%. Management said the proceeds would repay the borrowings under its bridge loan facility in full (debt largely tied to folding Elon Musk's xAI and X into SpaceX ahead of the IPO), with anything left over going to general corporate purposes (likely including more AI infrastructure). The offering was a reminder of just how expensive the company's artificial intelligence (AI) ambitions will be.
Then came this week's AI reckoning. Semiconductor stocks sold off hard as investors questioned whether the boom in AI infrastructure spending can persist. That reassessment has been a headwind for anything priced on AI ambitions, and SpaceX, which is now part rocket maker, part satellite internet provider, and part AI company, qualifies.
Finally, on Thursday, the company aborted a Starship test flight moments before launch.
"Some of the engines didn't start, triggering an automatic launch abort," Musk wrote on X.
A scrubbed launch is a routine setback. But it capped off a rough week.
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Cheaper isn't the same as cheap What matters more is what investors actually get at $124. SpaceX generated $18.7 billion of revenue in 2025, and it lost $4.9 billion for the year.
Starlink, the company's satellite internet service, is the engine. The segment produced $11.4 billion of revenue in 2025, or 61% of the company total. And its subscriber base keeps climbing, compounding from 2.3 million at the end of 2023 to 8.9 million at the end of 2025 to 10.3 million by the end of March. That is exceptional growth.
However, the average Starlink customer is paying less over time. Monthly revenue per user has stepped down from $99 in 2023 to $66 in the first quarter of 2026. In other words, Starlink's growth is coming from adding users, not from charging them more. That's fine for now, but it could become a problem if subscriber growth ever slows.
The AI business is the expensive part. That segment, built around xAI, generated just $3.2 billion of revenue in 2025. It's also behind most of the new debt -- the June bond sale retires borrowings SpaceX took on to bring xAI in-house.
Now for the valuation. At $124 per share, SpaceX still commands a market value of about $1.6 trillion. That works out to more than 80 times the company's trailing sales, for a business losing billions of dollars a year. For perspective, a multiple of 20 is often considered generous for a fast-growing company when it's based on earnings -- not sales.
Put another way, even with the stock down about 45%, the market is still pricing in a future in which Starlink keeps compounding, Starship works, and the AI bet pays off in a big way -- all at once.
Of course, SpaceX owns assets nobody else has: the world's dominant rocket program and a satellite internet business without a true peer.
And investors will learn a lot soon. The company's first quarterly report since going public is coming, and insider lockup expirations begin rolling off in August.
But owning singular assets doesn't automatically make a stock worth more than 80 times sales. At $124, shares are arguably cheaper than they've ever been -- and still not cheap.
In a move that could help validate SpaceX’s (SPCX 5.43%) enormous investment in artificial intelligence (AI), the company is reportedly discussing a multi-billion-dollar computing contract with the Department of Defense (DOD), as originally reported by The Wall Street Journal.
The terms of the agreement, while not yet confirmed by the Pentagon or SpaceX, would allow the Defense Department to use SpaceX’s data centers to run AI models. This could follow similar deals SpaceX has inked with Alphabet (NASDAQ:GOOG) and Anthropic, and place it among an exclusive group of cloud-computing providers that are supporting the Pentagon’s AI operations.
Although the deal remains tentative and, in The Journal’s words, “could fall apart,” the development may reveal something important for SpaceX investors. Let’s take a closer look.
Image source: The Motley Fool.
Why investors should pay close attention to this deal To really understand the significance of this deal, we should step back and remember how closely SpaceX’s future is now tied to artificial intelligence.
Until Feb. 2, 2026, SpaceX was best known for launching rockets and managing its satellite-based internet service, Starlink. But in early February, SpaceX acquired xAI, forming a massive entity that’s now valued at about $1.6 trillion.
The acquisition not only brought two of Elon Musk’s businesses under the same roof but also provided xAI with a larger capital base to help it scale faster. The idea is that eventually, the AI business will become SpaceX’s major growth engine, even if it’s burning cash right now. Indeed, in SpaceX’s pre-IPO roadside show, the company claimed AI will unlock a $26.5 trillion market opportunity, whereas the market opportunity for the other two businesses is about $2 trillion.
Here’s the kicker, however: xAI generated an operating loss of about $6.4 billion in 2025. Although the rest of SpaceX’s operations helped offset some of that damage, the company still posted a net loss of about $4.9 billion for the year.
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This is where the potential deal with the Pentagon comes in. If the Pentagon becomes a multi-billion-dollar customer, SpaceX’s AI segment could start carrying some of the financial load investors expect it to shoulder. At the very least, it could help offset this segment’s heavy losses, bringing the space company closer to profitability.
And this isn’t just any old customer, either. This is the DOD, a government agency. Once SpaceX is approved to handle its workloads, which, mind you, could contain sensitive or classified information, walking away from it won’t be easy, nor will it be cheap. Indeed, the high switching costs alone could turn this contract into a pretty durable, long-term revenue stream -- one that could increase in value if the agency decides to purchase more computing power over time.
Does the deal with the Pentagon make SpaceX a screaming buy right now? I wouldn’t call SpaceX a screaming buy right now, nor even a murmuring one. And it has everything to do with SpaceX’s valuation right now.
The stock has been trading at a premium since its mid-June market debut. It currently trades more than 40% below its all-time high; even so, SpaceX trades at more than 80 times sales.
At the end of the day, SpaceX investors are being asked to believe in many things that seem outlandish at first glance. Lunar settlements, missions to Mars, orbital data centers. Some of these ambitions may eventually materialize; others could remain fantasies. For now, I would continue watching SpaceX from the sidelines, at least until its valuation comes back down to earth.
Few companies have grabbed the attention of investors this year like Space Exploration Technologies (SPCX 5.41%), better known as SpaceX. The company's public debut last month briefly made CEO Elon Musk the world's first trillionaire.
The company is setting out to accomplish things no other company has even considered before it, just as it did with reusable rockets, and the long-term potential could be huge. Its registration statement for the initial public offering (IPO) said it has an overall estimated total addressable market of $28.5 trillion.
Investing in SpaceX requires a long-term mindset. And few investors are better known for the long-term mindset than Warren Buffett. He can provide some excellent insights for investors considering SpaceX for their portfolio. Here are three must-read quotes.
Image source: The Motley Fool.
Buying into IPOs SpaceX had the biggest IPO in history last month, raising over $85 billion once the underwriters exercised their option to buy additional shares. But the fact that the company had no issues raising that much capital from the market speaks to an undeniable truth.
It's why Buffett says he's never bought any IPO: "The idea of saying the best place in the world I could put my money is something where all the selling incentives are there, commissions are higher, the animal spirits are rising, that that's going to be better than 1,000 other things I could buy where there is no similar selling enthusiasm ... just doesn't make any sense."
IPOs are a seller's market. The company holds all the cards; underwriters are incentivized to pump the stock. The odds of making a good purchase are against you.
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Most IPOs experience a first-day pop in price, but the long-term results aren't usually any better than the overall market. Since 1980, the average IPO has slightly underperformed the market average over the three years following its debut if you could buy the shares at the offer price. That's despite underwriters intentionally underpricing IPOs to drive demand for the stock and a good first-day result.
With SpaceX trading around its IPO price, investors should still exercise some caution.
A business with a future that's hard to predict SpaceX's future depends on many variables. A lot has to go right for it to achieve the potential the market is already pricing into the stock.
It has to successfully launch and scale up its fully reusable Starship heavy-lift spacecraft. It has to use that to lower the cost of putting new satellites into orbit to scale up its Starlink service, and it has to sell that service to consumers worldwide. It has to prove the viability and cost competitiveness of orbital data centers. And it has to out-innovate leading artificial intelligence (AI) labs with its own AI model.
Buffett's take on this subject: "Investors should remember that their scorecard is not computed using Olympic-diving methods: Degree-of-difficulty doesn't count. If you are right about a business whose value is largely dependent on a single key factor that is both easy to understand and enduring, the payoff is the same as if you had correctly analyzed an investment alternative characterized by many constantly shifting and complex variables."
I think it's fair to say Buffett would put SpaceX into the "too hard" pile. He wouldn't be able to determine a fair value for the business because there are too many variables in a highly dynamic market. There are many stocks in the market that are far easier to understand than SpaceX. If you can't wrap your brain around its fundamentals and how it generates significant returns on its capital over the long run, it's worth exploring other options first.
Speculating is bad for your investment returns Buffett produced phenomenal results for investors by buying companies when he had a high degree of confidence he was buying the stock at or below its intrinsic value. His top holdings have durable competitive advantages that all but guarantee they can produce above-average earnings growth in the long run. Ultimately, that's reflected in the stock price.
Or as he put it succinctly, "I would rather be certain of a good result than hopeful of a great one."
SpaceX holds a lot of promise. But space-launch services are still a relatively nascent industry. The potential for its Starlink to disrupt broadband and mobile internet services is reliant on significant capital and scaling.
And its AI business, which accounts for the bulk of its estimated total addressable market, is still in the very early stages. Not to mention that things like Mars colonization are capital-intensive undertakings over decades with no clear payoff.
Yes, if SpaceX successfully accomplishes all it has set out to achieve, it could be the most valuable business in the world by a wide margin. But there's such a high degree of uncertainty about its future right now that it's hard to justify its current valuation. There are many other investments in today's market that you can buy with a high degree of certainty that they will produce good results.
Space Exploration Technologies (SPCX 5.41%) has lost almost $1 trillion in notional value since its stock peaked in the initial days following its initial public offer (IPO). As of this writing on July 16, the stock (also known as SpaceX) is trading near its initial public offering (IPO) price of $135, about $133 the last time I checked.
If you watched this stock hit about $201 at the end of its third trading day, you might be wondering if this is the chance to buy in. Raymond James, which co-managed SpaceX's IPO, recently set a $800 price target on the space stock. Even the average price target, about $244, implies 83% upside.
Even if the $800 price target materialized, it would take a very large investment for SpaceX to mint new millionaires: about $166,250 at today's price. Obviously, not every investor has six figures to invest with, nor would it be prudent to put that much into a stock that still trades at about 100 times sales. The question then becomes: Even if SpaceX alone can't make you a millionaire, can it be one of several stocks that you pick that contributes to millionaire status?
In other words, is SpaceX a buy at $133 a share?
Image source: The Motley Fool.
SpaceX's business is booming, and expectations are growing SpaceX is an incredible business; operationally, it is extraordinary. According to the company's own figures, it has launched more than 80% of the global mass that went into orbit annually since 2023. Its Falcon missions have achieved a 99% success rate, with 165 Falcon 9 mission in 2025.
Of the roughly 15,000 active satellites in orbit, SpaceX operates about 10,000. Subscribers to the company's Starlink internet access have jumped from about 5 million in the first quarter of 2025 to roughly 10.3 million a year later, with service now available across about 164 countries and territories.
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Artificial intelligence (AI) represents the company's largest opportunity -- about $26.5 trillion. Yet it's also SpaceX's biggest cash drag. It invested almost $18 billion on AI development in 2025, equivalent to about 96% of its $18.7 billion revenue.
In order for SpaceX to be considered a buy today, even a weak one, its AI division needs to flip from a negative to a positive, something that many on Wall Street are expecting. For example, analysts at Goldman Sachs think SpaceX's AI business could generate $322 billion in 2030, while Morgan Stanley projects about $190 billion from AI by that year.
Analysts at Morgan Stanley have projected the company's revenue hitting $3.4 trillion in 2040 -- a searing compound annual growth rate of about 41%.
In that most bullish scenario, SpaceX could be worth several times more than what it is today. If it traded at five times sales, $3.4 trillion in revenue would be equivalent to a $17 trillion valuation. Assuming the share count stays the same, the stock would trade at about $1,300, or more than nine times its current price.
So, is SpaceX a buy? If all these numbers and predictions make your eyes gloss over, consider this: The market has sky-high expectations for SpaceX -- so high that any little setbacks or disappointing news could send the stock reeling down.
That volatility is why I still shy away from this stock. Nothing has led me to firmly believe that SpaceX will mint new millionaires, nor that it's even a buy at today's price. That's not because I don't trust its business; I just don't see a world in front of me in which this company's core businesses generate trillions in sales.
When that world becomes more realistic, then I might change my mind. Until then, I would hold off on buying SpaceX, at least until it trades at a lower valuation.
Max Chafkin, Bloomberg Businessweek Columnist, discusses recent losses for Elon Musk's SpaceX including a scrubbed launch and a slide in shares that equates to roughly $1T in valuations. He also talks about the "identity crisis" happening at Elon Musk's Chatbot Company.
Retail investors talked up five hot stocks during the week (July 13 to July 17) on X and Reddit’s r/WallStreetBets, driven by retail hype, earnings, listings, AI infrastructure momentum, and corporate/geopolitical news flow.
Netflix Retail investors were complaining about the stock’s poor performance on r/wallstreetbets. The stock had a 52-week range of $70.86 to $127.75, trading around $66 to $75 per share, as of the publication of this article. It declined by 40.53% over the year and 15.51% in the last six months. The stock was also down 20.70% YTD. NFLX had a weak price trend in the medium, short, and long terms, with a solid quality score as per Benzinga’s Edge Stock Rankings. Some retail investors were confident that the decline in ASTS stock was a buying opportunity. The stock had a 52-week range of $36.08 to $133.86, trading around $52 to $56 per share, as of the publication of this article. It advanced by 4.52% over the year and dropped 52.48% in the last six months. The stock was down 24.25% YTD. Benzinga’s Edge Stock Rankings showed that ASTS had a weak price trend in the long, short, and medium terms. SK Hynix Retail investors were still confident of the AI’s memory bottleneck trade, with some thinking of buying the memory dips. Since its listing, the stock has traded in the range of $151.30 to $194.80, and around $148 to $153 per share, as of the publication of this article. It has declined by 10.41% since debuting on the bourse. SKHY maintains a weak price trend over the long, short, and medium terms with a solid growth score, as per Benzinga’s Edge Stock Rankings. Micron Technology Several retail investors were sure of holding MU despite its decline this week, targeting space stocks. The stock had a 52-week range of $103.38 to $1,255.00, trading around $828 to $854 per share, as of the publication of this article. It advanced by 632.80% over the year, 135.20% over the last six months, and 198.94% YTD. According to Benzinga’s Edge Stock Rankings, MU was maintaining a strong price trend over the short, medium, and long terms, with a good quality score. Space Exploration Technologies Several retail investors were bearish on SpaceX stock. The stock has traded in the range of $130.74 to $225.64 since listing. It was down 12.59% since its debut, and lower by 37.98% over the last month, as of the publication of this article. SPCX has had a weak price since the time it listed, as per Benzinga’s Edge Stock Rankings. Retail focus comprised AI infrastructure momentum, earnings, and corporate news-driven narratives with broader market action during the week.
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What goes up can come down. We're seeing that axiom play out with Space Exploration Technologies (SPCX 5.43%), better known as SpaceX. Shares of the space technology company skyrocketed immediately after its record-setting IPO. In recent weeks, though, SpaceX stock has plunged more than 30% below its peak.
However, SpaceX still boasts a market cap of over $1.7 trillion. I think there's a chance that it could grow much larger over the next decade. In fact, I predict that SpaceX stock could be worth a whopping $5 trillion or more -- if one thing happens.
Image source: Getty Images.
Putting the cloud into orbit SpaceX's crown jewel right now is its Starlink satellite internet services unit. You could make a pretty good argument that SpaceX could reach a market cap of $5 trillion if Starlink fulfills its potential and disrupts the businesses of telecom giants such as AT&T (T 0.77%) and Verizon (VZ 0.66%). However, I'm not convinced that's going to happen.
Interestingly, though, Starlink accounts for only around $1.6 trillion of SpaceX's estimated $28.5 trillion total addressable market. Most of that staggering amount, roughly $26.5 trillion, is related to artificial intelligence (AI).
SpaceXAI, formerly xAI, has already notched some big wins providing computing capacity for AI applications. For example, Anthropic is paying $1.25 billion per month for using SpaceXAI's data center near Memphis, Tennessee. Alphabet's (GOOG 2.06%) (GOOGL 2.05%) Google Cloud is paying $920 million per month for compute capacity.
But I think that the biggest opportunity for SpaceX is processing AI workloads in space. And that's exactly what the company hopes to do with its Starmind initiative. SpaceX wants to build a constellation of up to 1 million satellites to run AI applications and beam the results back to Earth.
The advantages of space-based AI processing are impressive. Free power from always available sunlight. Significantly lower cooling requirements than in terrestrial data centers, since heat radiates into space. No protests against data centers near residential areas.
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A $5 trillion+ valuation is possible. Could SpaceX really achieve a valuation of $5 trillion if Starmind works? I think it's possible.
Granted, the largest AI cloud provider, Amazon Web Services (AWS) (AMZN 0.91%), currently has an annualized revenue run rate of around $150 billion. SpaceX would have to make a lot more than that to deserve a market cap of $5 trillion.
However, Starmind's lower costs could create demand that doesn't exist today. And no company is better positioned to make space-based AI processing a reality than SpaceX.
The technological hurdles are still daunting, though. I suspect they'll be resolved, but it could take years. Investors betting on SpaceX hitting the $5 trillion market might have to wait a while.
Keith Speights has positions in Alphabet, Amazon, and Verizon Communications. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Alphabet and Amazon. The Motley Fool recommends Verizon Communications. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.
Investors who put $1,000 into SpaceX (NASDAQ: SPCX) stock after the company’s addition to the Nasdaq-100 Index have seen their investment decline amid a pullback in the shares.
SpaceX stock traded around $149 on July 7, shortly after joining the Nasdaq-100. With shares changing hands at approximately $123 at press time, a $1,000 investment made following the index inclusion would now be worth about $826, representing a loss of roughly 17%.
SPCX one-month stock price chart. Source: Finbold The decline comes after SpaceX enjoyed strong momentum following its June 2026 initial public offering.
The company priced its IPO at $135 per share and quickly surged above $225 as investors piled into the stock, driven by optimism surrounding its Starlink satellite business, Starship development program, and broader commercial space ambitions.
Notably, SpaceX shares have faced pressure in recent weeks due to a combination of company-specific and broader market factors.
A delayed Starship test flight caused by engine-related issues weighed on investor sentiment, while concerns over upcoming lockup expirations raised expectations of increased share supply entering the market.
At the same time, rising short interest and a broader rotation away from high-growth stocks have contributed to the stock’s decline.
Despite the recent weakness, SpaceX continues to benefit from growing Starlink revenue and a strong backlog of government and commercial contracts, supporting its position as one of the leading companies in the space industry.
Nasdaq-100 addition marked a major milestone SpaceX’s inclusion in the Nasdaq-100 represented a significant achievement for the newly public company.
The index tracks the 100 largest non-financial companies listed on the Nasdaq exchange and is followed by numerous exchange-traded funds (ETFs) and institutional investors.
Inclusion typically increases a stock’s visibility, liquidity, and ownership among passive investment funds that track the benchmark.
The move also placed SpaceX alongside some of the largest technology companies in the market, further boosting investor interest following its IPO.
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It was the most important day for Space Exploration Technologies Corp. (SPCX 5.41%) – commonly known as SpaceX – since its IPO: the 13th test launch of the Starship megarocket that forms the cornerstone of Elon Musk’s plans for continued space launch dominance.
But it ended with a whimper and not a bang.
As the countdown timer hit zero, after the engines had already ignited, the launch was scrubbed. That left the massive rocket – and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk’s grand ambitions – in limbo yet again.
Here’s why this delay could cause big headaches for Musk and for SpaceX investors.
Image source: Getty Images.
What happenedThe Starship megarocket is a huge vessel, standing 407 feet tall, with its Super Heavy booster powered by 33 Raptor rockets, each capable of providing 50,000 pounds of force at liftoff.
Starship’s massive size gives it a vast cargo capacity of over 100 metric tonnes (220,000 pounds). By transporting larger payloads with a single launch, Starship promises to dramatically lower the cost per ton of flying things into space.
Flight 13 was scheduled to be the second test launch of Starship’s Version 3 (V3). Version 1 had six test flights in 2023-24, and Version 2 had five in 2025. The first V3 test, Flight 12, successfully launched on May 22 after a scrubbed attempt on May 21. During Flight 12, one of the launch rockets failed to ignite, and 13 of the 33 booster engines failed to relight mid-flight, resulting in loss of the booster.
As Flight 13’s countdown timer hit zero on Thursday evening, at least four of Starship’s Raptor engines failed to ignite. The company is replacing two of them and has said it will try again on Monday evening. The ship has remained on the launch pad with its propellant removed.
If at first you don’t succeed...With his other company, Tesla (TSLA 2.47%), Musk frequently made promises and set deadlines for product launches, only to miss them repeatedly, sometimes by years. Tesla investors gave him the benefit of the doubt, and the company eventually grew to dominate the electric vehicle market.
The SpaceX investors who eagerly snapped up shares on the company’s IPO date in June would likely be willing to extend Musk the same leeway... but this time, there’s a literal race against the clock, and a deep-pocketed competitor nipping at SpaceX’s heels.
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That competitor is Blue Origin, the private company founded by Amazon (AMZN 0.91%) founder Jeff Bezos. While it was initially focused on space tourism, Blue Origin has begun flying missions for NASA. It’s put its space tourism flights on hold to focus its resources on its lunar lander vehicle, which is expected to debut later this year.
A true space raceThe Trump Administration has been eager to send astronauts back to the moon and has set a 2028 goal for a manned lunar mission, dubbed Artemis IV. That would leapfrog China, which plans to land its taikonauts on the moon by 2030.
In April, NASA’s Artemis II mission performed a successful lunar flyby, but the agency doesn’t yet have a viable vehicle to land a crew on the lunar surface. SpaceX’s Starship was originally tapped for that role, but last year, NASA announced it would use Blue Origin’s lander if it were ready first.
That means that SpaceX has just two years to demonstrate to NASA’s satisfaction that it can make it to the moon, land there, take off again, and get back to Earth, all while supporting a four-person crew. But as of right now, Starship hasn’t even managed to make it into a stable orbit around Earth.
Image source: Getty Images.
What it means for investorsSpaceX’s stock is down 38% from its all-time high, and is down more than 8% since the day before the scrubbed launch. A successful retry of Flight 13 will likely stop the bleeding, at least temporarily.
But even if Flight 13 is an unmitigated success, there will need to be a Flight 14, and a Flight 15, and more tests of ever-increasing complexity. The odds that something goes wrong on at least one are high. The amount of cash required for further development is also high.
As SpaceX continues to iterate using its rapid prototyping and “test as you fly” philosophy, investors should brace for explosive volatility both in their portfolios and on the launch pad.
Elon Musk's space transportation, satellite internet connectivity, and artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure company, Space Exploration Technologies (SPCX 5.43%), went public on June 12 with an opening price of $150 that day. In the days that followed, stock quickly rallied to an all-time high of $225.64, resulting in a market capitalization of almost $3 trillion.
However, as of the market close on Thursday, July 16, SpaceX stock was down 45% to just $125 as of mid-afternoon Friday. Although Wall Street is forecasting significant revenue growth for the company, its stock continues to trade at a sky-high valuation, which could lead to further volatility from here.
Should retail investors take this opportunity to buy the dip, or would they be better advised to steer clear?
Image source: The Motley Fool.
SpaceX is chasing $28.5 trillion worth of opportunities Elon Musk founded SpaceX in 2002 with a clear mission to make the human race interplanetary, but in the years since, it has expanded its focus. The company went on to develop the world's first reusable rocket, which dramatically lowered the cost of launching humans and commercial payloads into orbit, and also reduced the downtime between launches.
The Falcon 9 rocket is responsible for most of SpaceX's successful launches to date, but its Falcon Heavy and Starship rockets have much higher payload capacities. This means they can carry more satellites (and eventually humans) into space per trip, further reducing costs. Starship is expected to enter regular service in a couple of years with a payload capacity of 100 tons, whereas Falcon 9 can carry a maximum of 23 tons.
However, launching astronauts and commercial payloads into space is actually SpaceX's least valuable business, with an addressable market of around $370 billion. The company's satellite internet connectivity segment is capturing a slice of a much larger opportunity worth $1.6 trillion. So far, SpaceX has sent over 9,600 of its Starlink satellites into orbit, where they provide wireless broadband internet access to 10.3 million paying customers here on Earth.
The company will start launching its new V3 satellites later this year, which will offer 10 times the bandwidth of its current V2 satellites. This is where Starship will become especially valuable, because it can deploy 60 satellites at a time, whereas Falcon 9 has a maximum capacity of just 27.
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But over the long term, SpaceX actually thinks AI infrastructure will be its most valuable opportunity. The company only entered this business in February when it acquired one of Elon Musk's other companies, xAI, which came with data centers like Colossus and Colossus II. Since then, it has signed agreements to rent billions of dollars' worth of its spare computing capacity to AI developers such as Anthropic, Alphabet, and Reflection AI.
In the future, SpaceX wants to launch clusters of satellites containing AI computing servers into space, where they can run on solar energy and won't need complicated cooling systems. This infrastructure would use Starlink for its data transmission needs, so the company already has a massive advantage over any other competitors aiming to operate orbital data centers. Overall, SpaceX values its total addressable market opportunity in AI at $26.5 trillion.
Investors are still paying a huge premium for SpaceX stock SpaceX generated $18.7 billion in total revenue during 2025, which was up 33% from 2024. The internet connectivity business brought in $11.4 billion, while the space segment generated $4.1 billion, and AI infrastructure delivered $3.2 billion. But that order looks set to change in 2026 and beyond, because of the value of its recent cloud computing deals.
SpaceX has agreed to lease up to $1.25 billion worth of data center capacity per month to Anthropic, plus another $920 million worth of capacity per month to Alphabet, and $150 million per month to Reflection AI. These deals could amount to tens of billions of dollars in annual revenue over the next few years.
As a result, Wall Street analysts think SpaceX could more than double its total revenue to $39.2 billion in 2026, and then grow it to $72.7 billion in 2027.
That growth potential explains why some investors are willing to pay a hefty premium for SpaceX stock, which currently trades at a price-to-sales (P/S) ratio of 88. That is 14 times the 6.3 P/S ratio of the tech-heavy Nasdaq-100 index, suggesting SpaceX is heavily overvalued compared to its big-tech peers.
Even if we value SpaceX based on its potential 2027 revenue, its forward P/S ratio is still 23.4, which is nearly 4 times higher than where the Nasdaq-100 trades today. And the company is not yet profitable.
Therefore, even after its 45% decline from its peak and its 17% drop from its first-day opening price, SpaceX stock is far from cheap. In fact, I think its lofty valuation leaves it exposed to even more downside potential, so I personally won't be buying this dip.
SpaceX (SPCX 5.43%) stock is one of the most popular stocks in the market right now.
*Stock prices used were the afternoon prices of July 14, 2026. The video was published on July 16, 2026.
Parkev Tatevosian, CFA 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. Parkev Tatevosian is an affiliate of The Motley Fool and may be compensated for promoting its services. If you choose to subscribe through his link, he will earn some extra money that supports his channel. His opinions remain his own and are unaffected by The Motley Fool.
Key Takeaways Starship's launch abort weighed on SpaceX shares but appears linked to an engine issue, not a design flaw.Starlink's expanding subscriber base continues to provide a strong recurring revenue stream for SpaceX.Despite testing risks, SpaceX's launch and satellite leadership support its long-term investment thesis. Space Exploration Technologies Corp. (SPCX - Free Report) shares came under pressure after Starship's 13th test flight scheduled on Thursday was aborted moments before take-off. The stock’s price fell below the IPO price on Thursday following this incident. After raising a record-breaking $75 billion through its June initial public offering, SpaceX has remained one of the market's most closely watched growth stories.
With the leading-edge designing, manufacturing and rocket launching capabilities, SpaceX has gained solid market traction over the past few years. However, are the recent developments a worrying sign for investors, and does it change SpaceX’s long-term investment case?
Starship Remains Vital to SpaceX’s Growth InitiativesSpaceX’s launch franchise is the foundation of the investment case. The company has completed about 650 orbital launches and has launched more than 80% of global mass to orbit since 2023, supported by Falcon reusability and high cadence. While Falcon 9 currently serves as SpaceX's primary launch vehicle, Starship represents the company's next-generation fully reusable launch system. Engineered as one of the world’s largest and most powerful reusable launch vehicles, Starship is expected to significantly reduce the cost while carrying a substantially higher payload.
The Starship project has a significant execution risk owing to its high complexity. This risk is not limited to the Space segment because the Connectivity and AI segment also relies on future launch throughput to reach its planned scale. The company faces competition from Rocket Lab Corporation (RKLB - Free Report) . Rocket Lab has been steadily extending its commercial launch capabilities through its Electron rocket and the upcoming Neutron launch vehicle. Electron achieved 21 launches in 2025 with 100% mission success, reinforcing reliability and customer retention.
SpaceX has repeatedly adopted a gradual development approach over the years. In each test flight, regardless of success or not, the company gathers valuable engineering data that helps improve the system. Given the high complexity of the process in developing reusable launch systems, temporary setbacks are not uncommon. Despite Rocket Lab’s growing prowess in commercial launch, SpaceX remains the leader in the industry, backed by its launch cadence, payload capability and reusable rocket technology.
Starlink Remains a Major Growth EngineBeyond Starship, Starlink remains one of SpaceX's strongest long-term growth drivers. As of March 31, 2026, the company boasts a subscriber base of around 10.3 million. With approximately 9,600 satellites in orbit, Starlink service is available in 164 countries and markets. Solid subscriber addition, expanding global coverage and continuous improvement in networking capacity are major driving factors. The company has also developed one of the largest satellite-to-mobile constellations and provides direct-to-device voice, messaging and data services. Expanding the Starlink business is providing the company with better earnings visibility and a diversified revenue mix. Strong recurring revenue from this segment will continue to support overall revenue growth and enable SpaceX to go through the development challenges of Starship.
However, it is to be noted that Starlink’s business faces competition from Viasat, Inc. (VSAT - Free Report) in the satellite-based broadband internet space. Viasat has built a strong presence in aviation, enterprise and government communications. It has completed the next-generation global ViaSat-3 constellation with the successful launch of ViaSat-3 Flight 3 on April 29, 2026, targeted to the Asia-Pacific region. Starlink’s rapidly expanding low-Earth-orbit constellation and a strong focus on technology upgrades are expected to give a competitive edge in the long run.
Should Investors Worry?The launch hiccup may impact investors’ sentiment in the near term. However, some key things to take into account are that the launch was aborted automatically, indicating that engine monitoring, safety systems and software worked. The company is proceeding with corrective action. It will replace two raptor engine and is aiming to complete the launch early next week.
However, SpaceX is scaling several capital-intensive platforms simultaneously. Despite SpaceX's strong long-term growth prospects, execution remains critical. Capital expenditures increased to $20.7 billion in 2025 as the company continued investing heavily in Starship development and Starlink expansion. While occasional testing setbacks are expected, prolonged delays could also delay commercialization and revenue-generating opportunities.
SpaceX currently carries a Zacks Rank #3 (Hold). You can see the complete list of today’s Zacks #1 Rank (Strong Buy) stocks here.
The two sides are discussing an arrangement in which SpaceX would provide computing capacity to the department at a cost of up to several billion dollars, people familiar with the matter said.
The satellite race is intensifying as Space Exploration Technologies (SPCX 5.41%) and AST SpaceMobile (ASTS +5.25%) seek to connect the world from orbit, leaving investors to decide which pioneer offers better long-term potential.
Space Exploration Technologies — SpaceX — provides high-speed internet through its Starlink constellation and dominates the global rocket launch market. AST SpaceMobile focuses on a direct-to-device cellular network, eliminating the need for specialized ground equipment. Both companies aim to bridge the global digital divide, but their business models and financial health vary significantly.
The case for SpaceXSpace Exploration Technologies provides rocket launch services to commercial and government agencies while scaling its Starlink broadband business. As of March 31, 2026, Starlink reported approximately 10.3 million subscribers across 164 distinct markets. The company leverages its reusable rocket technology to deploy its own satellite constellations at a significantly lower cost than traditional aerospace firms.
In FY 2025, revenue reached nearly $18.7 billion, an increase of approximately 33% from the $14 billion reported in the previous year. Despite this top-line growth, the company reported a net loss of nearly $5 billion for the fiscal year. This performance reflects the massive capital requirements for building out the global Starlink network and developing next-generation heavy-lift rockets.
As of its December 2025 balance sheet, the current ratio is approximately 1.4x, indicating the company maintains sufficient short-term assets to cover its immediate liabilities. Free cash flow, calculated as cash flow from operations minus capital expenditures, was about negative $14 billion in FY 2025. Note that stock-based compensation (SBC) accounted for roughly 28.7% of operating cash flow, inflating reported cash generation, since SBC is a non-cash expense added back in the cash flow statement.
The case for AST SpaceMobileAST SpaceMobile is building a space-based cellular network designed to connect standard, unmodified smartphones directly to satellites. The company has established partnerships with approximately 60 mobile network operators, including AT&T (T 0.77%) and Verizon (VZ 0.71%), targeting nearly 3 billion potential subscribers. This business model focuses on a revenue-sharing agreement within the communication stocks space rather than selling direct hardware to consumers.
In FY 2025, revenue reached approximately $70.9 million, a substantial jump from the $4.4 million reported in the prior fiscal year. The company reported a net loss of nearly $342 million for the period. While revenue growth is accelerating as the company begins its commercial rollout, profitability remains a distant goal during this build-out phase.
The current debt-to-equity ratio is roughly 1.2x, showing the company relies more on debt than equity to fund its operations. Free cash flow, which is cash flow from operations minus capital expenditures, was more than negative $1.1 billion for FY 2025, reflecting heavy investment in its satellite constellation.
Risk profile comparisonSpace Exploration Technologies faces significant risks associated with the high cost and technical complexity of its satellite and rocket programs. Any delays in launch schedules or mission failures could disrupt the expansion of the Starlink network and impact customer trust. Additionally, the company must navigate evolving international regulations regarding orbital debris and spectrum allocation that could limit its growth in certain regions.
AST SpaceMobile deals with financial strain, having recently issued $1 billion in convertible notes that could dilute existing shareholders. The business success depends on the unproven Block 2 satellites and proprietary ASIC chips, which face potential delays and cost overruns. The company also competes against better-funded rivals like Space Exploration Technologies and must maintain complex regulatory approvals from the FCC to operate its network.
Valuation comparisonSpace Exploration Technologies carries a lower P/S ratio than AST SpaceMobile, although both are high relative to the sector.
MetricSpace Exploration TechnologiesAST SpaceMobileSector BenchmarkForward P/En/an/a240.6xP/S ratio88.9177xSector benchmark uses the SPDR XLI sector ETF.
Valuation metrics sourced from Financial Modeling Prep (FMP) and may differ from other data providers.
Which stock would I buy in 2026?The success of Tesla (TSLA 2.47%) has made founder Elon Musk the richest man in the world and given him the expectation that he can make an even greater fortune out of SpaceX, as Space Exploration Technologies Corp is known. The business certainly has market support behind it, raising the world’s largest IPO, $85.7 billion.
SpaceX's various businesses intend to leverage the company's core launch capabilities, done with reusable rockets. The ability to reuse boosters significantly lowers per-launch costs and spreads fixed manufacturing costs across multiple missions. Expectations are that scaling up quickly will happen, with Wall Street analysts projecting $39 billion in sales for fiscal 2026 with a much lower net loss, around $1.6 billion, and move into profitability in 2027.
The lack of free cash flow looks to be crushing; however, projections indicate free cash flow will be negative $28 billion this year, jumping to negative $67 billion in 2027.
AST SpaceMobile doesn’t have the grand ideas of SpaceX (no Mars colonies planned here), but the organization expects its space-based network to give it a significant business in a few years. Essentially, AST SpaceMobile is a direct-to-device play to provide full mobile phone compatibility for major carriers without the need for specialized equipment. Many of its potential clients are also equity holders in the company, including AT&T, Verizon, Vodafone (VOD +0.74%), Alphabet (GOOGL 2.05%), American Tower (AMT +0.68%), Bell Canada, Telus (TU 1.79%), and Rakuten in Japan.
By the end of the year, the company should have 45 satellites, which will allow it to fully service the U.S., and that should start to supercharge revenue growth. For fiscal 2026, Wall Street sees $149 million in sales, jumping to $725 million the following year, when the company is projected to turn its first modest profit. Free cash flow looks to be much more manageable, with analysts expecting positive free cash flow in 2029.
While SpaceX has the hype from its high-profile founder and its extravagant projections about far-off businesses, it, too, is mainly a network provider right now. Given AST SpaceMobile appears more focused on its business plan and will probably be the earlier of the two to turn a profit, it’s the space stock to buy in 2026.
After a wild first month, Space Exploration Technologies (SPCX 4.61%), better known as SpaceX, is now below its IPO price of $135, and well under its initial trading price of $150. As of mid-afternoon Thursday, shares were changing hands for around $131. And from the peak of $225.64 it hit in its first week on the market, SpaceX is down 42%. Essentially, every investor who bought in after the IPO is now underwater.
For investors considering taking advantage of this opportunity to buy SpaceX stock for less than its IPO price, the question is where it might head from here. In the near term, that answer could depend significantly on a couple of major events coming in August. Let's review those upcoming catalysts, and consider what a $10,000 investment made today might be worth after the dust settles.
Image source: The Motley Fool.
What's coming up for SpaceX SpaceX hasn't announced a date for its first earnings report as a public company yet, but it's expected to happen on or around Aug. 6. SpaceX's financials have been a mixed bag so far. Its connectivity segment, which primarily consists of its Starlink satellite broadband unit, has been the bright spot. Of the company's $4.7 billion in Q1 revenue, connectivity accounted for $3.3 billion, and it's SpaceX's only profitable segment right now.
The first post-IPO earnings report will give investors a chance to see how revenue is growing and whether SpaceX is getting closer to profitability. If revenue and income make sizable jumps, that could start to bring SpaceX's valuation into more reasonable territory.
The other reason August will be a critical month for SpaceX is that it's when insiders will be able to start selling their shares. The space company put staggered lock-up periods in place for insiders and private stakeholders. These early shareholders will be permitted to sell up to 20% of their stock starting on the second trading day after its first post-IPO earnings report. They'll be able to sell an additional 10% if SpaceX stock trades at 30% or more above its IPO price for at least five of the 10 trading days before its earnings release. That seems unlikely at the moment, but considering how volatile SpaceX has been, it's still a possibility.
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The impact of the earnings report will depend on the numbers, but the additional shares could create selling pressure regardless, as insiders will likely start to take some of their profits.
SpaceX stock could be due for more difficulties in the near term. Even after its recent dip, it still trades at about 92 times last year's sales. It will most likely still look richly valued after its next earnings report, more shares will be hitting the market, and the hype that led to its initial pop seems to have worn off.
I don't think SpaceX stock will crash, but I expect it to continue losing value and trade in the $110 to $120 range by September. If you were to invest $10,000 in SpaceX at around $131 a share, in six weeks, your investment would be worth roughly $8,400 to $9,200 if this prediction proves accurate. Given the risks, it may be wise to wait for SpaceX's valuation to come down even further before investing.
The stock has tumbled nearly 40% from its post-IPO high, erasing the gains that once sent shares soaring above $200 and slipping below its $135 IPO price. For many investors, the obvious question is whether the excitement has faded as quickly as it arrived.
Nancy Tengler, CEO and CIO of Laffer Tengler Investments, believes that’s the wrong question entirely.
Looking At The Wrong Time HorizonFor Tengler, the recent selloff says more about investor psychology than it does about SpaceX’s long-term prospects.
“I don’t invest for the next three or four weeks,” she said. “I invest with a three-, five-, or 10-year time period.”
That distinction matters because some of the market’s biggest winners looked far less convincing during their early years as public companies.
“It’s got some parallels to the Meta IPO, but in our view it’s more analogous to Amazon,” she said.
The comparison isn’t about identical businesses. It’s about how transformational companies often force investors to endure years of volatility while the underlying business compounds in value.
The Price Isn’t the ThesisSpaceX’s recent decline has reignited debates over whether the stock ran too far, too fast after its blockbuster debut.
Tengler isn’t dismissing those concerns. Instead, she argues they’re being asked too early.
For long-term investors, the more important question isn’t whether SpaceX should trade above or below its IPO price today. It’s whether the company’s businesses — from Starlink’s rapidly expanding satellite internet network to its dominance in commercial launches — continue to strengthen over the next decade.
That framework shifts the conversation away from technical levels and toward execution.
After all, Amazon spent years disappointing investors who focused on quarterly share-price swings while rewarding those who focused on the business it was building.
Volatility Is Part Of The JourneyTengler acknowledged that the stock could remain volatile in the near term, particularly after its explosive run immediately following the IPO.
Rather than chasing momentum, she said periods of weakness are when long-term investors should begin paying closer attention.
“If it continues to decline, we will, in fact, step in,” Tengler said.
Her broader message is that SpaceX’s nearly 40% pullback doesn’t necessarily change the investment thesis—it simply changes the price at which investors can buy into it.
For traders, the recent selloff may be a warning sign.
For investors thinking in five or 10 years, Tengler suggests it may be something else entirely: the kind of volatility that has accompanied many of the market’s most transformative companies before.
Image via Shutterstock
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Falling below $125 per share today, Space Exploration Technologies (SPCX 4.42%) stock is officially a broken IPO now -- trading $10 below the point at which it priced its IPO last month. Investors who missed out on the IPO, therefore, can count themselves lucky they didn't lose money.
Image source: The Motley Fool.
But why is SpaceX down at all? And specifically, why is it down 4.7% through 12:10 p.m. ET today?
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Scrub one launch The most obvious catalyst is that SpaceX was forced to scrub a planned Starship test flight last night after at least two Raptor engines on the Starship's Super Heavy booster failed to ignite. CEO Elon Musk says those engines will need to be replaced, delaying Starship's "lucky" 13th test flight until early next week.
To be confident of a good flight, 2 Raptors will be removed & replaced. Most probable launch timing is early next week.
-- Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 17, 2026 What it means for SpaceX stock As reasons for a sell-off go, this one's kind of weak. On the one hand, yes, a lot of SpaceX's hopes and dreams hinge on Musk making Starship a success. The megarocket is the only launch vehicle on Earth capable of carrying Musk's V.2 Mobile and V3 Starlink satellites to orbit. In its Human Landing System form, Starship is also the designated hitter on NASA's plan to return astronauts to the moon.
That said, Starship is a project years in the making. Delaying liftoff by a few more days isn't going to do SpaceX any harm -- certainly not as much harm as trying to fly and failing because the engines didn't work. Long story short:
If you liked SpaceX stock as an investment yesterday, before the launch scrub, there's absolutely no reason to like it any less today.
Rich Smith 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.
SpaceX (NASDAQ:SPCX | SPCX Price Prediction) came public last month in one of the most anticipated IPOs of the decade, and the reception on day one was everything Elon Musk could have wanted.
Nearly 185 million shares, or about 29% of the public float, are now sold short, representing $25 billion in wagers, according to CNBC.
This marks a significant increase from just three weeks ago when short interest was between 5% and 7%. The surge in short selling comes as SPCX’s stock struggles, having dropped below its $135 IPO price on Wednesday.
Short Sellers Increase PositionsThe increase in short selling activity has been dramatic, with short interest ballooning from an estimated 40 million shares to 185 million shares.
Matthew Unterman, head of research at S3 Partners, noted the continuous demand from short sellers building speculative positions since the IPO. CNBC reported this trend has contributed to the stock’s downward momentum.
SpaceX Stock Dips Below IPO PriceTechnical AnalysisSPCX is currently on a six-day losing streak, with its market cap shrinking by approximately $240.01 billion over the past week. Despite the recent downturn, SPCX trades 43.74% above its 50-day simple moving average of $87.04 and 218.27% above its 200-day simple moving average of $39.31, indicating a long-term uptrend remains intact.
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This content was partially produced with the help of AI tools and was reviewed and published by Benzinga editors.
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Space Exploration Technologies (SPCX 4.42%) stock briefly fell below $125 a share on Friday, before recovering to about a 4% loss as of 12:55 p.m. ET in the afternoon -- and it doesn't matter.
Whether down 5% or only 4% today, SpaceX stock is officially a broken IPO, returning to just pennies above its IPO price Wednesday, and falling well below it Thursday and Friday. But here's the real question.
Image source: Getty Images.
Is SpaceX's below-IPO share price good or bad news? That's a tougher question to answer. On the one hand, SpaceX stock has lost the momentum that drove it up 67% from its IPO price in its first three days of trading. The company faces new competition from China, which just completed its first successful water landing of a reusable rocket. It's also been forced to postpone a Starship test flight when multiple engines refused to ignite at launch.
Worst of all, SpaceX's big bet on turning itself from a space stock into an artificial intelligence stock has gone awry, with investors selling off AI stocks in droves the past several days -- "SpaceXAI" among them.
We are now @SpaceXAI. pic.twitter.com/ema66xDWC9
-- SpaceXAI (@SpaceXAI) July 6, 2026 Is SpaceX stock cheap now?
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Those are all reasons to avoid SpaceX stock -- but now here's one reason to buy SpaceX instead:
At its new share price of $125, SpaceX stock costs 192 times forecast 2027 earnings, but earnings are expected to grow so fast that by 2028 the P/E ratio drops to 33, and by 2029 -- just 22.5.
Analysts see SpaceX earnings growing on average 152% annually over the next five years, more than doubling every year. While the future's uncertain, and the end may always be near, there's now a reasonable case to be made that SpaceX stock is approaching fair value -- and will soon be cheap enough to buy.
Rich Smith 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.
This post may contain links from our sponsors and affiliates, and Flywheel Publishing may receive compensation for actions taken through them.
The Defiance Daily Target 2X Short SpaceX ETF (CBOE:SPCQ) is up about 10% today, trading around $23 per share, as shares of Space Exploration Technologies (NASDAQ:SPCX | SPCX Price Prediction) slide below $125, $10 under the original IPO price.
SPCQ is a leveraged, inverse, single-stock ETF. It is engineered to deliver roughly negative two times the daily performance of SpaceX. Put simply: when SpaceX falls 5% in a session, SPCQ is designed to rise about 10% that day, before fees. SCPQ is up 91% since it launched in mid-June.
Why SpaceX Is Sliding Last night, SpaceX scrubbed a planned test flight for Starship V3, the newest spacecraft in Elon Musk’s arsenal. As he noted on X, “some of the engines didn’t start, triggering an automatic launch abort.”
He followed up by sharing that “most probable launch timing is early next week” after the crews have diagnosed what went wrong.
For a stock as hyped, and as expensive by any traditional valuation metric, as SpaceX, any misstep can spook investors, and that’s what we’re seeing here. When you’re paying 80x+ annual revenue for a stock, it’s priced for perfection.
Underneath this specific news is a genuine debate about valuation. Commentators have flagged the enormous capital SpaceX needs to fund Starship, the Starlink satellite broadband build-out, and its xAI/Grok artificial-intelligence arm acquired earlier in 2026.
How the 2X Inverse Mechanic Actually Works SPCQ does not hand you a short position in SpaceX to hold. The fund uses swap agreements and short-dated options, backed by Treasuries and cash, to synthetically deliver negative 200% daily inverse leveraged exposure to SPCX. Crucially, that target resets every single trading day.
The daily reset matters enormously for anyone thinking about holding the fund. Over any period longer than one session, SPCQ’s return will diverge, sometimes sharply, from a simple negative-two-times SpaceX return. Compounding works in the holder’s favor during a steady one-way decline (which is why SPCQ has run so far as SpaceX has fallen for weeks), and against the holder during choppy, whipsaw markets. This is the volatility drag effect that has historically eroded leveraged and inverse ETFs held for weeks or months. A holder can be directionally right about a stock and still lose money in a product like this if the path is jagged enough.
Small Fund, High Costs, Tactical Use Only SPCQ is a very small, very specialized vehicle. Recent data pegs its assets at roughly $22.53 million, and the prospectus lists a gross and net expense ratio of 1.31%. Those fees compound daily against the holder. Stacked together, the risks are considerable: leverage, inverse exposure, single-stock concentration, and a newly public underlying whose price discovery is still in its early innings.
That is why products like this are designed strictly as short-term tactical or hedging tools. Today it is doing exactly what a trader would want it to do: amplifying a sharp down move in SpaceX into a double-digit gain. The same math will work in reverse the day SpaceX rallies. Investors watching the ETF should keep an eye on whether SpaceX starts rallying or continues lower, and remember that SPCQ’s headline numbers reflect a specific, path-dependent daily strategy tied to each session’s move.
Contact [email protected] for any questions or corrections.
Super Heavy v3 Booster 20 hangs from the chop sticks at Pad 2 as it prepares to roll back to the SpaceX launch production facility in Starbase, Texas, U.S., July 17, 2026. REUTERS/Steve Nesius Purchase Licensing Rights, opens new tab
SummaryCompaniesSpaceX plans to replace two booster Raptor engines before the next launch attempt, Musk saidFour of the booster's 33 engines did not ignite during Thursday's aborted test flightStarship could carry 20 Starlink satellites on its 13th flight test, the company saidWASHINGTON, July 17 (Reuters) - SpaceX (SPCX.O), opens new tab is targeting Monday for another attempt to launch its Starship rocket after a last-second abort during engine ignition on Thursday, a brief setback that nevertheless wiped roughly $100 billion from the newly public company's market value.
The company's Starship rocket ignited its engines for a 13th test flight from Texas, but stopped short of lifting off when an automated abort command shut the engines down early. Four of the Starship booster's 33 engines did not ignite, according to a live SpaceX depiction of the booster's engines.
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A launch delay for the $15 billion rocket development program better known for dramatic engineering feats and explosive testing failures is not uncommon. Still, SpaceX shares have dropped by roughly 6% to $124.30 since the abort, erasing roughly $100 billion in equity value.
Musk wrote on X that the abort was triggered because "some of the engines didn't start." SpaceX on Friday hoisted the Starship upper stage off its Super Heavy booster and plans to replace two of the booster's Raptor engines "to be confident of a good flight," Musk said, without explaining why some engines didn't start.
"Most probable launch timing is early next week," he added. SpaceX's website said Starship could launch "as early as Monday, July 20."
The share price drop offers an early glimpse into how the newly public company's investors might judge the progress of a high-tech rocket program on which SpaceX's most lofty ambitions rely.
The stock had already been sliding from a post-IPO high of $225.64 and fell below SpaceX's $135 IPO price on Wednesday. The abort accelerated the decline.
"If this is how the market reacts to a precautionary abort, I can't wait to see how it responds to a successful flight," Chad Anderson, CEO of Space Capital and a SpaceX investor since 2017, said via text message.
"Zoom out and none of this changes the thesis: we're in the early innings of a multi-decade infrastructure cycle, and Starship is the centerpiece," he added. "Day-to-day price action is noise against the backdrop. This is a long-term opportunity."
Some SpaceX employees on X, which is owned by SpaceX, sought to explain the abort and delay to next week.
Director of Starship engineering Shana Diez said on X that the Thursday launch scrub was the first time a fully stacked Starship rocket lit its engines and then aborted.
"While similar to a wet dress rehearsal," she said, referring to a practice run of a rocket launch, "there is a lot going on and any first time operation comes with additional risk."
"This is how we learn safely and implement mitigations for all scenarios," said Jessie Anderson, a Starship production engineer who sometimes hosts the company's launch live streams.
PRESSURE RISINGSpaceX has launched 12 Starship test flights since 2023, some ending in explosive failures and other hard testing setbacks that have become hallmarks of SpaceX's test-to-failure development ethos, a risky and capital-intensive approach that has been key to the company's quick growth.
But the pressure is rising for Starship to begin operational flights after nearly a decade in development and over $15 billion spent so far.
Two pillars of SpaceX's future growth hinge on Starship: expanding the Starlink network to beam service directly to mobile devices and eventually launching thousands to potentially a million AI-processing satellites into space.
SpaceX aims to launch the first Starlink satellites to orbit on Starship by year's end, followed by routine launches, the company said in its prospectus.
Starship will carry 20 Starlink satellites on its 13th flight test to demonstrate its satellite-dispensing system and the Starlink network's laser communication links, but those satellites will follow the ship's suborbital trajectory and burn up in Earth's atmosphere soon after deployment.
The rocket will launch out of Florida for the first time "potentially" by year's end, SpaceX engineer Kate Tice said Thursday on the Starship live stream.
Reporting by Joey Roulette; Editing by Sanjeev Miglani
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles., opens new tab
Joey Roulette is a space reporter for Reuters covering the business and politics of the global space industry, often focusing on space power competition and how commercial interests intersect with international relations. He was part of a team that won the 2024 Pulitzer Prize in national reporting for Reuters' coverage of Elon Musk's business empire. On the space beat for roughly a decade, Joey previously worked for the New York Times, the Verge, and various publications in Florida.
SpaceX stock is at significant support. What’s pressuring SPCX? Engine Failures Force a Last-Second Starship AbortThe damage began during Thursday’s session when the stock shed 3.08% before sliding another 3.08% in after-hours trading to close at $127.07. The catalyst was a launch termination that came with mere seconds remaining on the countdown after four of Starship’s 33 Raptor engines refused to fire. The remaining 29 engines cut out automatically in response and ground crews began draining propellant from the vehicle shortly after.
Musk took to X to explain that two of the faulty engines would be pulled from the rocket entirely and swapped out before another window is attempted, with early next week identified as the earliest realistic opportunity for a second try.
The scrubbed mission had been carrying significant expectations. The test now waits for another day, pushing back a milestone that investors and the broader space industry have been watching closely.
SPCX’s Short-Term ChallengesZoom out and the longer‑term structure still looks constructive. Zoom in and the near‑term picture is under pressure. SPCX is trading 18.4% below its 20-day SMA $151.60, a clear sign that the latest leg higher has cooled and sellers have controlled the short window. It remains well above the 50-day SMA $87.01 and far above the 200-day SMA $39.28, which keeps the bigger trend bullish even if the stock is acting like it wants to test investor patience.
Momentum is driving the conversation. MACD is below its signal line and the histogram is negative, which signals fading upside thrust unless buyers can reassert control. The moving‑average stack still leans supportive over time with the 20-day SMA above the 50-day SMA and a June golden cross where the 50-day SMA moved above the 200-day SMA. Those conditions often encourage buy‑the‑dip behavior when pullbacks deepen.
Price action is not cooperating with textbook setups. The stock is now below the 52-week low $130.74 and well off the June peak at $225.64, so rebounds are likely to be treated as prove‑it rallies until SPCX can start reclaiming shorter‑term levels.
Key levels are straightforward. $135.82 is the first meaningful hurdle, sitting near the 20-day EMA and acting as a potential trend reset line after a sharp drop. On the downside, $126.30 is the immediate battleground, especially with price trading below the prior $130.74 zone. This area is where bulls may try to defend before the narrative turns more negative.
SPCX Shares Are DecliningSPCX Price Action: SpaceX shares were down 3.90% at $126.00 at the time of publication on Friday. The stock is trading at a new 52-week low, according to Benzinga Pro.
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SpaceX SPCX stock is tumbling further this morning after the firm’s 13th Starship test flight was aborted right before liftoff as several engines failed to start properly.
The development adds fuel to the bearish fire that has already assembled a $25 billion wall against billionaire Elon Musk’s space infrastructure and artificial intelligence (AI) behemoth.
As of writing, around 185 million SPCX shares are sold short, meaning skeptics now control nearly 29% of the giant’s publicly tradeable float, a huge jump from about 7% only just a few weeks ago.
SpaceX stock is currently hovering around $124 – about 8% below its initial public offering (IPO) price.
Short sellers are piling against SPCX stock primarily because of its astronomical valuation, heavy corporate debt, and an imminent wave of share unlocking.
SpaceX is still going for about 90x sales, facing continuous pressure to deliver flawless execution, which the test flight failure today reinforces is hard to achieve for a space infrastructure company.
The recent $25 billion bond issuance to finance “capital-intensive” AI infrastructure and ongoing rocket development has sparked heated debates over long-term profitability timelines.
Crucially, because the initial IPO float comprised only 5% of the total 13 billion shares outstanding, a huge portion of insider equity is currently restricted.
Bears anticipate that as major tranches open up, beginning with an 11% unlock tied to Q2 earnings, the sudden influx of tradable stock will dilute buyers and further depress share prices.
For retail and institutional investors, this rising wave of short-selling signals an era of intense near-term volatility and a fundamental shift in market psychology.
This bearish sentiment suggests Wall Street’s post-IPO euphoria has officially unwound.
Market participants are now moving away from speculative excitement and demanding concrete financial accountability, especially after the firm’s multi-billion dollar losses last year.
With nearly a third of the float heavily shorted, SpaceX shares are highly sensitive to both technical and fundamental developments.
Simply put, the asset is poised for explosive swings; any overwhelmingly positive catalyst – such as a successful Starship launch sequence or a surprise earnings beat – could force short sellers to rapidly cover their positions, triggering an intense short squeeze.
Despite the rising short interest and the Starship test flight failure on July 17th, Wall Street remains bullish as ever on what the future holds for SPCX shares.
Of the 33 analysts who currently cover the space infrastructure and AI giant, at least 24 recommend buying it at the current price.
More importantly, the consensus price objective on SpaceX sits at about $235 currently, indicating potential for a nearly 90% rally over the next 12 months.
SpaceX (NASDAQ:SPCX | SPCX Price Prediction) investors are watching retirement savings crater. One Reddit user put the pain bluntly: “So my Roth IRA is down 25 percent, I went and made a few options trades in Robinhood that also went the other way.”
That confession, posted to r/WallStreetBets and surfaced by Futurism on July 15, 2026, reveals the human cost of a fast-souring trade. The user disclosed they had leveraged their Roth IRA with SpaceX options calls at $160 and $145 strikes, a high-risk bet that wiped out several hundred thousand dollars of retirement savings.
How the SpaceX Stock Trade Unraveled SpaceX went public last month, pricing its IPO at $135 and opening at $150 in June 2026. Shares rocketed to an all-time high of $225 before reversing hard. As of July 15, the stock sat near $136, down roughly 40% from the peak and almost 9% over five trading days.
The decline has continued. As of July 17, market data shows SPCX trading around $124.03, after falling 5.4% on the day and about 14% over the past week. Anyone who bought near the top is now deeply underwater.
The Skeptics Were Already There On WallStreetBets, sympathy was sparse. “Crazy that people knew the insanely bloated valuation but still went long,” one user wrote, capturing the collective amnesia that grips hyped stocks on the way up.
Skeptics extended beyond Reddit. Reuters framed the sell-off as a “confidence test” for the IPO. Matthew Maley of Miller Tabak was direct: “It raises the narrative that the stock is up on fluff, on speculation, on froth, and not on real fundamentals.” Greg Halter of Carnegie Investment Counsel warned that early buyers hoping to “make a killing” would be disappointed.
Act now: the analyst who called NVIDIA in 2010 just named his top 10 AI stocks — and SpaceX didn't make the cut. Grab the names FREE today.
SpaceX priced at a multitrillion-dollar valuation despite losing billions per quarter, with much of its worth resting on Elon Musk’s vision of AI data centers in space and a city on Mars rather than current profitability. When a valuation leans that heavily on the future, sentiment drives the stock.
Why a Roth IRA Loss Cuts Deeper This episode illustrates a principle about using leverage and options inside a retirement account.
A Roth IRA is one of the most powerful tools an ordinary saver has because gains compound untaxed over decades. Contributions can be withdrawn without penalty, but turning the account into a venue for short-dated options on a newly public, pre-profit stock inverts its purpose. A loss inside a Roth is uniquely unforgiving: there is no capital loss to harvest, and selling a battered position permanently forfeits contribution room that can never be rebuilt.
The investor who watched a quarter of their retirement vanish is a warning. The hype around a company can be real, the technology revolutionary, and the stock can still hand a devastating loss, especially when a saver borrows against their own future to chase it.
Act now: the analyst who called NVIDIA in 2010 just named his top 10 AI stocks — and SpaceX didn't make the cut. Grab the names FREE today.
Shares of space names are sliding Friday morning as a sharp one-month reversal deepens across the sector. AST SpaceMobile stock (NASDAQ:ASTS) is down 32% over the past month, and SpaceX shares (NASDAQ:SPCX | SPCX Price Prediction) are down 34%, trading at new post-IPO lows.
The damage during the past month extends across even more space-sector names. Rocket Lab stock (NASDAQ:RKLB) has slid 36%, and Virgin Galactic shares (NYSE:SPCE) are off 28%. Meanwhile, the diversified Procure Space ETF (NYSEARCA:UFO) is down 14% over the same stretch.
The question investors are asking is whether the sector is broken or simply shaking out excess. The data suggests the latter, though it’s a brutal, high-volatility reversal after a massive run.
Starship Scrub and Convertible Notes Fuel the Selloff SpaceX’s Starship V3 Flight 13 was scrubbed Thursday night. SpaceX CEO Elon Musk posted on X that some engines didn’t start, triggering an automatic launch abort, with another attempt expected in a few days. The scrub was expected to be a positive catalyst and instead deepened the slide, with SpaceX having gone public on June 12.
JPMorgan’s Seth Seifman remains cautious, focused on how quickly the second stage can refly and on refurbishment cost and time. He also noted short sellers have built a large bearish position in SpaceX shares.
AST SpaceMobile stock’s 2026 low follows a surprise $1 billion convertible senior notes raise this week, priced at 1.625% and due 2034 with a $79.57 conversion price that sparked dilution fears. Options traders Jon and Pete Najarian called the structure “a pretty strong bet to the upside” given the conversion price, while stressing AST SpaceMobile stock is extremely volatile with implied volatility at 100%.
Rocket Lab shares are up slightly in Friday morning trading. The company features a vertically integrated business model that Rocket Lab’s peers may want to emulate. Virgin Galactic stock has been swept up in the same speculative-space unwind.
Goldman Says Volatile, Not Doomed Per Goldman Sachs reporting, its U.S. space and satellite basket is five times as volatile as the S&P 500 and twice as volatile as a comparable AI basket. Yet, the basket was still up 13% this year through July 14 after surging more than 360% over the prior two years. SpaceX was added to the U.S. space and satellite basket on July 14.
Goldman’s Louis Miller stated that the theme has evolved beyond the purely speculative, though “investor enthusiasm will likely move ahead of fundamentals at times,” making the path “uneven.” He added that the “picks and shovels” providers across communications infrastructure, semiconductors, materials, and manufacturing could lead the next leg.
Goldman also noted that some space businesses could turn profitable next year, with the broader basket profitable by 2027. That framing supports viewing the recent selloff as a violent shakeout within a still-up long-term speculative theme, rather than a structural collapse.
UFO Offers a Diversified Way to Play the Theme The Procure Space ETF illustrates the value of diversification. UFO shares are down 14% over the past month, a fraction of the drawdowns in the individual names. As of April 30, the fund held AST SpaceMobile at 4% and Rocket Lab at 5%, plus a small Virgin Galactic position, and did not hold SpaceX.
The fund is a narrow, globally diversified thematic space product with concentration risk and no leverage. That mix cushioned the drawdown, but it also caps upside on any single-name rebound. For investors who want space exposure without single-stock blowup risk, the ETF is one route.
What to Watch Next The bull case rests on falling launch and satellite costs, rising orbital-broadband demand, and expanding defense budgets tied to programs like Golden Dome. On the other side, the bear case is extreme volatility, largely unprofitable companies, dilution risk at AST SpaceMobile, and execution setbacks like the SpaceX Starship scrub.
Retail traders remain cautious. In a StockTwits poll, space trailed memory and neoclouds among beaten-down sectors investors wanted to buy. Given the 100% implied volatility on AST SpaceMobile stock, investors should consider keeping their position sizes modest.
Investors can watch for the next Starship attempt in the coming days, any acquisition or partnership announcement tied to AST SpaceMobile’s $1 billion raise, and Rocket Lab’s Neutron debut launch targeted for Q4 2026. Those catalysts could reset the narrative in either direction.
Key Takeaways Get personalized, AI-powered answers built on 27+ years of trusted expertise.
The wild ride for SpaceX shares has picked up momentum.
SpaceX (SPCX) stock hit a fresh post-IPO low on Friday morning, putting it on track for a sixth straight day of losses, after the company scrapped a rocket test flight late yesterday. Shares were recently down more than 5% at $124, a far cry from the highs above $225 set a month ago just days after the company’s record-breaking IPO.
Though SpaceX remains among the world’s most-valuable companies, the slump has trimmed its market capitalization to roughly $1.6 trillion from nearly $3 trillion last month.
Commenting on the planned Starship test flight in a post on X, CEO Elon Musk said late Thursday, “Some of the engines didn’t start, triggering an automatic launch abort.” He added that the next launch attempt could happen in a few days.1
There hasn’t been much for SpaceX investors to cheer about in recent weeks, even as the stock has been added to the Nasdaq 100 and other major stock indexes, and as Wall Street investors remain bullish on the prospects for the space exploration, connectivity and AI company. Most analysts have a “buy” recommendation on the stock, with their average price target above $290, according to Visible Alpha.
Investor sentiment has turned amid a broader downturn for AI stocks, while the upcoming expiration of lock-up agreements could add to the volatility. Those agreements, which are set to start expiring in August, keep initial shareholders from selling the stock.
HomeIndustriesAerospace/DefenseThe Ratings GameThe Ratings GameEchoStar’s stock has for months been seen as a way to more cheaply get exposure to SpaceXJuly 17, 2026, 12:18 p.m. ET
EchoStar’s star might be on the rise and worth a fresh look after a volatile stretch, according to analysts.
The stock ECHO surged late last year after the company agreed to sell billions of dollars’ worth of spectrum rights to AT&T T and, later, to SpaceX SPCX. As part of its dealings with SpaceX, EchoStar will receive SpaceX common shares, which established it as a proxy for the then-private company. Its SpaceX stake is worth $34.4 billion as of Thursday.
SpaceX Corp (NASDAQ:SPCX) shares fell on Friday for a fifth consecutive session after the company's Starship rocket automatically aborted a test launch moments before liftoff because of an engine ignition issue.
Shares of SpaceX opened 4% lower at $126, below the company’s June initial public offering price of $135.
The launch attempt at SpaceX's Starbase facility in Boca Chica, Texas, was halted just seconds before the planned liftoff during the ignition sequence. Launch telemetry showed that four of the rocket's 33 Raptor engines failed to ignite, triggering the automated safety system to shut down the remaining engines and keep the vehicle on the launch pad.
Launch teams then began offloading propellant from the rocket.
"Some of the engines didn't start, triggering an automatic launch abort," SpaceX CEO Elon Musk wrote on the social media platform X. "Now offloading propellant. Next launch attempt hopefully in a few days."
In a follow-up post, Musk wrote that SpaceX would replace two Raptor engines "to be confident of a good flight," with the next launch attempt targeted for early next week.
The mission would have marked the 13th test flight of Starship and was carrying 20 upgraded V3 Starlink satellites intended to test orbital communications.
The US Federal Aviation Administration cleared SpaceX to resume Starship test flights earlier this week following an investigation into the company's previous test in May. During that mission, the Starship upper stage completed its planned trajectory toward the Indian Ocean, but the Super Heavy booster lost multiple engines before its landing burn and descended uncontrolled into the Gulf of Mexico.
The latest test marked the first full-scale Starship launch attempt to be aborted at the final seconds before liftoff, with the rocket's automated launch system preventing the vehicle from leaving the pad after detecting insufficient engine performance.
When Space Exploration Technologies (SPCX 3.07%) debuted last month, it became the largest initial public offering (IPO) ever. However, after a blistering start, the stock has fallen back down to earth and now trades around its IPO price.
Let's look at three reasons I think the company (commonly called SpaceX) could lose half its value over the next year.
Images source: The White House.
1. An extreme valuation It's not uncommon for IPOs to debut at frothy valuations, but SpaceX takes this to a whole other galaxy. The company has a nearly $2 trillion market cap, making it one of the 10 largest companies in the world. However, its revenue increased by only 33% to $18.7 billion last year while the company recorded an operating loss.
The company is expected to see a meaningful acceleration in revenue this year, with Morgan Stanley projecting sales will climb to nearly $45 billion. Nonetheless, that still values SpaceX at a forward price-to-sales (P/S) multiple of 40 times for what is ultimately a business with high capital expenditures that is likely to burn cash for about the next decade. In fact, Morgan Stanley does not project that it will become free cash flow positive until 2035.
As such, not only does the stock carry an extreme valuation, but it will also need to take on debt or issue equity on top of that.
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2. Unrealistic goals and timelines With not much to justify its current valuation in the form of revenue or profits, CEO Elon Musk instead has made a bevy of promises and predictions to get investors excited. Eventually, these will have to be realized, or investors may lose faith. However, Musk has a poor track record in this area, with The New York Times recently reporting that fewer than 20% of his past predictions were delivered on schedule.
Among Musk's recent promises for SpaceX have been a data center in space by next year, the company generating $1 trillion in revenue by 2030, and launching five uncrewed ships to Mars later this year with a fleet of Tesla Optimus robots. All are unlikely to happen.
The Mars Mission and orbital AI data centers both have big technical hurdles that still need to be overcome. For the Mars Mission, the biggest obstacle is refueling, as its largest rocket, Starship, uses up most of its fuel to reach low Earth orbit. Musk has a history of making promises about landing on Mars, but has consistently missed deadlines.
Meanwhile, putting a data center in space would require the company to solve the issue of chips being affected by cosmic radiation and to devise a way to cool a system in the vacuum of space. Coming up with solutions for those obstacles will take time and won't happen in the next year. Meanwhile, $1 trillion in revenue by 2030 is an outlandish number that would need everything to go the company's way.
Missing out on Musk's predictions could eventually weigh on the stock.
3. Lockup expirations Perhaps the biggest catalyst for SpaceX shares to plummet over the next year is that many more of them will hit the open market. At its IPO, fewer than 5% of its shares were available to be traded, but the number to hit the open market will expand exponentially over the next year as the company faces 15 lockup expirations over this period.
The first lockup expiration will come later this month or in early August after the company's first earnings release, when insiders will be permitted to sell 911.5 million shares. That's more than the 555.6 million shares the company initially offered in its IPO.
With a flood of new shares hitting the market over the next year, the likelihood of SpaceX missing deadlines, and an extreme valuation, the stock could easily see its price cut in half over the next year -- and it would still arguably be expensive.
