Reed’s view
The thing about becoming a publicly traded company is that bankers have to figure out how to value businesses that often don’t fit into a neat box. But assessing how the rocket and satellite maker stacks up against other companies right now is ultimately a pretty silly exercise — and one that isn’t rooted in the actual promise of what buying shares in SpaceX today will yield in the future.
SpaceX made $18.7 billion in 2025. With a speculative valuation target of something like $1.75 trillion, that’s a multiple of 93 times sales. That’s highly unusual — companies on the S&P 500 are trading at about three times sales.
Nearly 70% of SpaceX’s revenue comes from Starlink, its satellite internet service, and that has led some to attempt to analyze it as a telecom provider. Sure, after stripping away the satellites, rockets, antennas, orbital mechanics, and civilization-scale ambition, SpaceX is basically a thing that gets you on the internet.
But should we compare it to Comcast? Comcast uses wires that were buried under your street sometime between the American Revolution and the invention of the salad fork, and has way more customers than Starlink. I’m one of them. Every month, it charges me a confusing amount of money. I complain about it, and then I continue paying.
I only pay for Starlink when my Comcast goes out or on road trips in California, where we’ll have space data centers before we get reliable cell signal.
Comcast does not launch rockets. It does not occasionally create glowing debris over the Caribbean. And it’s only valued at $90 billion! And yet, something tells me Comcast may not have the same upside as SpaceX.
So let’s try to find another comparison. SpaceX, which acquired xAI, is also in the business of building unsightly, noisy AI data centers like the one it built in Memphis in a record 122 days. Anthropic is now paying $1.25 billion per month to use Colossus. So, in a sense, SpaceX is also a landlord in Memphis, right?
A comp for that could be Mid-America Apartment Communities, a Memphis-based real estate investment trust with more than 100,000 apartment units, which is how many GPUs Colossus has. You can live in an apartment. You cannot live in a GPU.
And if SpaceX eventually buys Tesla, another company owned by Elon Musk, you’ll have to factor in its cars, humanoid robotics, energy storage, and robotaxis.
In other words, to really get a clear picture of how to value SpaceX, you’d have to roll up some frankenstein amalgamation of Comcast, Lockheed Martin, Amazon Web Services, Nvidia, Verizon, NASA, a REIT, a defense prime, an airline, a cloud company, a railroad, and perhaps a science-fiction franchise.
Even then, it would make no sense to look at it like a holding company.
The closest comparison is probably Alphabet, which is its own version of a giant, weirdly unclassifiable company whose core business throws off cash while funding AI, cloud computing, autonomous vehicles, quantum computing, biotech, and assorted projects that sound fake until they become antitrust exhibits (Alphabet’s moonshots are, so far, metaphorical).
Buying shares in SpaceX — like Tesla was once upon a time — is more like a call option on several enormous futures at once. You’re betting that a world with robots and rockets and AI is going to fundamentally change the economy. Today’s financials don’t really even matter.
Notable
- SpaceX could face some risks, Bloomberg’s Thomas Black writes, if it decides to acquire Tesla — which has been struggling from competition with Chinese EV makers — or if it drains its resources to power xAI.