SpaceX IPO Priced at 103x Sales, Triple Palantir’s Valuation Multiple

Published by James Harris on June 10, 2026June 10, 2026

Sen. Elizabeth Warren has formally asked the SEC to delay the SpaceX IPO, scheduled to begin trading on Nasdaq under the ticker SPCX as early as June 12, citing valuation concerns and structural disadvantages for retail investors. At a target price of $135 per share for 555 million Class A shares, the offering would be the largest in U.S. history at a $1.75 trillion implied valuation.

The valuation math is where this gets genuinely difficult to defend. SpaceX is being offered at roughly 103 times trailing sales, about 40% richer than Palantir, which currently holds the most expensive multiple in the S&P 500. Morningstar pegged fair value closer to $780 billion. The company posted a $1.9 billion operating loss in Q1 2026, with xAI alone burning $2.5 billion in the same period, though Starlink’s $4.4 billion in operating income provides real underlying revenue. Warren’s intervention is politically familiar, but the underlying concern about index fund mechanics is not trivial: recent rule changes could force major indexes to add SPCX quickly after listing, meaning passive investors in retirement accounts would be compelled buyers at whatever price the stock opens at, regardless of whether it reflects reality.

History is not kind to mega-cap IPOs. The ten largest U.S. listings by initial market cap have trailed the S&P 500 by an average of 127 percentage points since debut.

The two cloud computing contracts disclosed in SEC filings complicate the bear case. Google is paying $920 million per month from October 2026 through June 2029 for GPU access, and a comparable deal with Anthropic covers SpaceX’s Memphis facility. Together those contracts carry a combined value above $70 billion and would generate roughly $26 billion in annual revenue if neither is terminated early, which would materially change the revenue base against which that 103x sales multiple is calculated. That does not make the IPO price reasonable, but it does mean the company is not purely a story stock. Warren’s letter lands in a market environment where retail participation in large IPOs has risen alongside broader equity enthusiasm, which makes the index-fund contagion risk she is flagging more plausible now than it would have been in a slower market.

The SEC under Chair Paul Atkins has not indicated any intention to delay the offering. If SPCX lists on schedule and opens at or above the target price, it will immediately become a test case for whether passive fund mechanics can sustain an extreme valuation when active managers are divided and the company’s own financials are mixed.