MW Can SpaceX live up to Wall Street's multitrillion-dollar hype?
By Christine Ji
As SpaceX prepares for the biggest public debut in history, some analysts warn that the company's 'moonshot' projections could fall short
SpaceX is seeking to raise $75 billion at a fixed price of $135 per share for its historic June 12 initial public offering.
Underlying SpaceX's record-breaking initial public offering is an equally jaw-dropping set of financial projections hinging on future markets like orbital data centers, space tourism, asteroid mining and more.
But the company's $(SPCX)$ multitrillion-dollar growth narrative isn't quite grounded in reality, Morningstar equity analyst Nicolas Owens warned on a Friday webinar. A bottoms-up analysis of SpaceX's existing businesses reveals an incredibly slim chance of achieving the financial image that the company and Wall Street investment banks have been peddling ahead of the IPO roadshow, according to Morningstar.
SpaceX is targeting a $75 billion raise at a fixed price of $135 per share, meaning that its June 12 IPO would be the largest ever recorded. The offering would value Elon Musk's rocket and artificial-intelligence conglomerate at a whopping $1.77 trillion.
The company is also setting its sights on what it believes is "the largest actionable total addressable market in human history" at $28.5 trillion, according to its regulatory filings. The lion's share of that is comprised of $26.5 trillion from AI, including enterprise applications and orbital data centers. Another $1.6 trillion comes from SpaceX's connectivity solutions across Starlink Broadband and Starlink Mobile. Lastly, $370 billion comes from space-enabled solutions such as the Starship launch vehicle.
Starship is the single most important factor that will determine SpaceX's future growth, PitchBook analyst Franco Granda said on Friday's webinar. In order to efficiently scale its satellite launches, orbital data centers and interplanetary travel ambitions, SpaceX needs to develop a fully reusable spacecraft.
But even if Starship can launch Starlink satellites faster and more cheaply, Owens still doesn't believe that SpaceX's connectivity solutions can reach a $1.6 trillion TAM, which equates to "essentially every dollar spent on mobile services on Earth."
"At the moment, we only see [Starlink] as an add-on to the current environment, as opposed to a direct competitor to the telecom players," Granda added. He believes the appropriate TAM for SpaceX's connectivity solutions is closer to the $130 billion mark - an entire order of magnitude smaller than SpaceX's projections.
Read: Elon Musk needs the cultish support of everyday investors to pull off the massive SpaceX IPO
Morningstar's base-case scenario, which it assigns a 50% probability, assumes that SpaceX achieves a reusable Starship rocket and somewhat economical orbital data centers. That would give the company an enterprise value of just under $1 trillion.
"As an engineering problem, it's doable," Owens said of orbital data centers. "The question is whether it's commercially viable and/or attractive compared to terrestrial compute," he added, highlighting that hardware maintenance and launch costs could pose challenges.
Morningstar sees a 43% chance of a bear case where SpaceX's AI segment fails to take off. That could result in an enterprise value anywhere between $0 and $611 billion. That leaves just a 7% chance of SpaceX achieving a "moonshot scenario" where Starship is reusable and orbital data centers are extremely economical, which would value the company up to $1.9 trillion.
See more: In 'wild' twist, SpaceX won't be allowed early entry to the S&P 500 after all
Morningstar's revenue projections are also significantly more conservative than the numbers floating around Wall Street. On Thursday, the Financial Times reported that Goldman Sachs $(GS)$, the lead underwriter of the SpaceX IPO, expects the company's AI revenue to rise to $322 billion by 2030, up from $3.2 billion in 2025. Over the same time period, overall revenue is expected to grow to $474 billion, from $19 billion in 2025.
Representatives from Goldman Sachs declined to comment.
In Morningstar's base case, Owens predicts $67.5 billion in revenue for 2030.
SpaceX's more speculative AI division is akin to a call option with a small probability of a massive payout, according to Owens. "You're paying for a possible but not entirely likely scenario," he said.
Also read: What SpaceX is really worth, according to the professor known as the dean of valuation
-Christine Ji
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June 06, 2026 08:30 ET (12:30 GMT)
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