SpaceX Prices $1.77T IPO on Unproven AI Business, Starlink Profits Hidden
What You Need to Know
- SpaceX IPO priced at $135 per share, targeting $1.77 trillion valuation, largest in market history.
- Morningstar values SpaceX at $780 billion, with gap reflecting bet on orbital AI data centers viability.
- Starlink generates $11.3 billion revenue with 39% operating margins; xAI posted $6.36 billion operating loss in 2025.
- $75 billion IPO raise validates investor demand but not necessarily the $1.77 trillion valuation price.
SpaceX is going public on June 12 at $135 per share, targeting a $1.77 trillion valuation in what would be the largest IPO in market history. Morningstar thinks the number should be closer to $780 billion, and the gap between those two figures is essentially a bet on whether orbital AI data centers become a real business.
The core tension here is that SpaceX is bundling a genuinely profitable infrastructure company with a money-losing AI division and pricing the whole package as if the AI works. Starlink is the only segment with clean fundamentals: $11.3 billion in revenue, 39% operating margins, and a near-monopoly on commercial launch capacity with 83% of all mass sent to orbit last year. That business, combined with the launch segment, accounts for roughly $611 billion of Morningstar’s estimate. Everything above that is xAI, which posted a $6.36 billion operating loss in 2025 despite heavy spending on Grok and the Colossus data center. Morningstar’s analyst assigned a 7% probability to the optimistic scenario and a 43% probability to the outcome where orbital AI infrastructure never becomes commercially viable. The structure rhymes with how SoftBank priced WeWork in 2019: a profitable core business obscured by an adjacent moonshot that carried most of the valuation weight.
A $75 billion raise underwritten by Goldman, Morgan Stanley, BofA, Citi, and JPMorgan does not automatically validate the price. It validates the demand.
For retail investors watching this from the crypto side, the SpaceX IPO matters as a liquidity signal. A deal this size pulling $75 billion into a single equity listing competes directly with risk assets broadly, and crypto has traded as a risk asset since 2020. If the IPO absorbs significant retail and institutional capital in mid-June, expect some near-term pressure on speculative positions elsewhere, particularly in altcoins that have been running on momentum rather than fundamentals. The Nasdaq listing also puts SpaceX in direct comparison with the Magnificent Seven, which means any post-IPO multiple compression would ripple through tech sentiment quickly.
The float at launch will be small, which historically produces an artificial price floor in the first weeks of trading. Morningstar’s projection of buying opportunities at lower levels after the IPO is not a contrarian call so much as a description of how most large, over-subscribed tech listings eventually resolve once the lockup dynamics shift and early holders begin to exit.
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