Valuing Elon Musk’s rocket and artificial-intelligence company SpaceX might be as hard as developing reusable rockets. But with a bevy of new research reports, investors can see how Wall Street approaches the problem.
Banks involved in an initial public offering typically wait a few weeks before starting research on a company. That was the case for SpaceX, and the waiting period ended on Tuesday. The company received 14 new Buy ratings, with an average price target of about $260. (The average price target, among all ratings, is about $247, according to FactSet).
The $260 number values SpaceX at about $3.4 trillion, or an Exxon Mobil more than Microsoft.
Microsoft and Exxon combined are expected to generate 2027 sales of almost $800 billion and earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization, or Ebitda, north of $300 billion, roughly 10 times what SpaceX is expected to produce.
But SpaceX has faster growth, and Musk has a knack for getting Wall Street to buy into his vision of the future. Musk, of course, has had his successes. Tesla sells a lot of electric vehicles and SpaceX parlayed reusable rockets into Starlink, a profitable space-based broadband product with more than 10 million customers.
Morgan Stanley analyst Adam Jonas has covered SpaceX longer than most. He sussed out the value of Starlink long before SpaceX contemplated its IPO. His price target on SpaceX is $300. Jonas values the company using a 15-year discounted cash flow model for each of SpaceX’s main businesses: Space, Starlink/Connectivity, and AI. By 2040, he sees sales hitting $3.3 trillion and Ebitda of $2.7 trillion.
Those are huge numbers, but 2040 is a long way away.
Valuing each business separately using a sum-of-the-parts methodology is popular among analysts, but there is still a wide variety of approaches to valuing SpaceX’s segments.
Deutsche Bank’s Edison Yu values the AI business at five times 2034 sales, or $1.2 trillion. He calls Starlink worth 58 times 2027 Ebitda, or about $1 trillion, and the space launch business worth 40 times 2040 sales, or $1.1 trillion. That adds up to about $3.3 trillion or $255 per share.
RBC’s Ken Herbert uses 2029 Ebitda multiples. He values Space at 25 times $3 billion in projected Ebitda, Starlink at 15 times $42 billion in projected Ebitda, and AI at 15 times projected $147 billion in Ebitda. That adds up to about $2.9 trillion or $225 per share.
BofA analyst Ron Epstein has a $235 price target for the stock, noting that everything hinges on Starship, SpaceX’s huge fully reusable rocket that can cut costs to reach space by 90% relative to its partially reusable Falcon 9.
Epstein values SpaceX using a discounted cash flow model. Some of the growth assumptions feeding that model are 8% average annual growth for the space business through 2031, 60% growth for Starlink, and almost 140% average annual AI sales growth from 2025 to 2031.
His model leaves SpaceX with 2031 sales of almost $800 billion and Ebitda of $580 billion.
The most surprising target comes from Raymond James’ Brian Gesuale. He values the company at $800 a share or north of $10 trillion. “We see the company as one of the defining industrial infrastructure companies of the 21st century,” he wrote. “Starship represents the defining industrial innovation of our generation.”
His valuation is partly based on a 27 times mulitple of 2031 Ebitda. Alphabet trades for about 16 times 2027 estimated Ebitda.
Is that the right multiple for SpaceX? Who knows. Time will tell.
SpaceX stock traded as high as $152.93 on Wednesday, but closed at $148.26, down 0.8%, while the S&P 500 dropped 0.3%. SpaceX shares fell 6.8% on Tuesday.
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