SpaceX's $85.7B IPO: A Valuation Test Trading Like Momentum, Not Fundamentals

SpaceX raised $85.7 billion in its October IPO at $135 per share. Three months later, the stock was trading around $137. For context, that is not an IPO. That is a rounding error with regulatory approval.

The company sold 555.56 million shares at that $135 offer price, pulling in $75 billion in primary capital. Underwriters exercised their greenshoe option for an additional $10.7 billion, bringing the total to $85.7 billion. Investors were, we are told, enthusiastic. The stock popped to $225.64 intraday before settling into a pattern of drift that would make a dead hand nervous. By late August, SpaceX had shed nearly $20 per share from that intraday high. The IPO price held. Barely.

This is the problem with valuing companies on what they might do rather than what they actually do. SpaceX generated $18.7 billion in revenue during fiscal 2025 and posted a $4.9 billion net loss. The company trades at 118 times fiscal sales. For comparison, Microsoft trades at roughly 9 times sales. Amazon sits around 3 times. Tesla, the aerospace enthusiast's preferred comparison, hovers near 8 times. SpaceX is not trading on fundamentals. It is trading on a spreadsheet from a pitch meeting.

Capital intensity tells the rest of the story. The company raised an additional $25 billion in bonds weeks after the IPO, signaling that $85.7 billion would not cover the infrastructure plans already announced. Quarterly capex has reached $18.4 billion. That burn rate, applied annually, devours north of $73 billion. Starlink satellite internet is expanding. The Starship reusable rocket system promises to lower deployment costs eventually. Anthropic agreed to pay $1.25 billion per month through May 2029 for access to SpaceX's compute capacity. These are real businesses with real growth paths. They are also not yet proven at scale, and they are certainly not proven profitable.

A former Nasdaq chief warned that SpaceX is not trading on fundamentals. He was kind. The stock is not trading on anything you can put in a spreadsheet that closes in three years. It is trading on optionality, on the bet that Elon Musk's latest venture will execute where others have failed, and on the assumption that artificial intelligence infrastructure will scale as dramatically as Silicon Valley believes it will. Those are not crazy bets. They are just not bets that warrant holding a stock flat for ninety days after an $85.7 billion capital raise.

To illustrate the mathematical distance between SpaceX's valuation and anything resembling historical patience, consider Walmart. An investor who placed $1,000 into Walmart stock in 1970 and did nothing but collect dividends and reinvest them now holds a position worth $38 million. That is fifty-six years of compounding at single-digit revenue multiples, turning retail inventory management into generational wealth. SpaceX is asking for the same belief, the same timeframe, and the same capital commitment on the strength of a company that has been public for three months and is burning $18.4 billion per quarter. The math does not require poetry to fail.

The valuation at $85.7 billion may prove conservative. The valuation may also prove to be the high-water mark for investors who bought at the offer price and held. The market has rendered its current judgment: neither enthusiastic nor skeptical, but trapped in the middle, where spectacular bets go to wait for earnings that may never justify the price.