Has the SpaceX share price already peaked at $225?

On 16 June, just two trading days after the biggest float in the history of capitalism, SpaceX (NASDAQ: SPCX) printed an intraday high of $225.64. Mark it on your calendar, because there’s a decent chance you’ll be telling your grandkids about it one day, either as the moment you got in early on the company that conquered the solar system, or as the bit of the story where the grown-ups should have known better. We’re not sure which yet. Neither, frankly, is anyone else. But let’s do the maths, because the maths is doing something special.

A valuation you’ll need a telescope to see

SpaceX priced its IPO at a take-it-or-leave-it $135 per share, raised around US$75 billion, and instantly became the largest IPO ever recorded, politely shoving Saudi Aramco off the podium it had held since 2019. The shares opened at $150, closed their first session up 19% at $160.95, and then kept climbing. After 3 days the company was worth north of US$2.5 trillion, making it roughly the sixth or seventh most valuable business in America.

Here’s the punchline. By revenue, SpaceX would scrape in around 200th. The company booked about US$18.7 billion in sales last year and, in the same breath, a net loss of roughly US$4.9 billion. At the IPO price the stock changed hands at around 94 times trailing revenue. By the time it kissed $225, that multiple had ballooned past 130 times. Not earnings, there aren’t any, but revenue!

To put 130x sales in perspective: back in 2002, Sun Microsystems boss Scott McNealy famously ridiculed anyone paying ten times revenue for his company, pointing out you’d need to hand shareholders 100% of revenue for a decade, with zero costs, just to break even, and that assumes nothing goes wrong. SpaceX is currently asking you to do that exercise thirteen times over. McNealy would need a lie-down.

A free float you could lose down the back of the couch

Now to the bit that makes this stock behave less like an investment and more like a fairground ride. SpaceX floated only a sliver of itself, somewhere between 3% and 5% depending on whose prospectus footnotes you believe. The other 95%-odd stayed locked up with Elon Musk, early venture backers and staff.

A tiny float meets enormous demand and you get fireworks. The book was reportedly oversubscribed several times over, with something like US$150 billion of orders chasing a US$75 billion raise. When the public can trade only a few percent of a company that half the planet wants a piece of, the price doesn’t so much get discovered as catapulted. There simply aren’t enough shares sloshing around for the price to behave like a sensible adult.

The part where your super fund buys your bags for you

This is the genuinely clever, or cynical, take your pick, bit of engineering. Under a Nasdaq rule change that conveniently took effect on 1 May 2026, a newly listed giant like SpaceX can be bolted into the Nasdaq-100 in as little as 15 trading days. Normally a company waits months.

Why does that matter to you, the affluent retail investor with an index fund or two tucked inside your retirement accounts? Because every passive fund tracking that index is then contractually obliged to buy SpaceX, at whatever silly price the market has set, regardless of whether a single analyst thinks it’s worth it. Bloomberg Intelligence reckons that forced buying could hoover up something like US$600 billion of passive money. Your nest egg may already own a slice of orbital data centres you’ve never heard of and never agreed to.

The treasurer of North Carolina saw this coming and refused to buy a direct stake for the state’s teachers and firefighters, declaring it too dear, then admitted, with a sigh you can almost hear, that the pension would end up holding it anyway through its index positions. Several university endowments reportedly have around 10% riding on SpaceX already. Resistance, it seems, is optional.

What has to go right (spoiler: a great deal)

So what are you actually paying 130 times sales for? Two things that don’t yet exist.

First, Starship has to work flawlessly and cheaply, not “flies impressively and occasionally disassembles itself over the Gulf” but rapidly reusable, launching multiple times a week, with the upper stage coming home intact about 85% of the time. The base-case forecasts being thrown around assume something like 340 Starship missions a year by 2035. That’s nearly one a day. Every day.

Second, data centres in space have to become a real, profitable business. The bull thesis is that orbital server farms, bathed in free solar power and cooled by the void, will feed humanity’s bottomless appetite for AI compute. It’s a genuinely thrilling idea. It is also, as one finance lecturer drily noted, currently more poetry than profit.

Morningstar ran the numbers three ways and landed on a fair value of around US$63 a share, roughly 70% below where the stock was trading. Their most optimistic “moonshot” scenario, in which Starship and orbital data centres both come good, gets to about $154. They give that happy ending a 7% probability. Seven. Musk himself has cheerfully suggested revenue might hit US$1 trillion by 2030. That would require the company to grow more than fiftyfold in five years, which is the sort of forecast that sounds wonderful right up until you write it down.

We have seen this film before

If “ignore today’s losses, you’re buying what it becomes” rings a bell, that’s because it was the official anthem of the dot-com bubble. In March 2000, Cisco was briefly the most valuable company on Earth at around 150 times earnings. It remains a fine business 26 years later and its shareholders from that peak waited the better part of two decades just to get their money back. Pets.com had a sock puppet and a Super Bowl ad and was bankrupt within the year.

The catch, and it’s a big one, is that SpaceX is no Pets.com. It launches more than 80% of the mass humanity puts into orbit. It has a real moat, a genuinely profitable Starlink engine throwing off cash, and a decade’s lead on every rival. That’s exactly what makes it dangerous. There’s a brilliant company under all that helium, which makes the balloon a lot easier to keep inflating.

So, has SpaceX peaked at $225?

Honestly? Nobody knows, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling you something. Index inclusion and that microscopic float could shove it higher still on pure momentum. But the forced-buying sugar rush is largely a one-off, an insider lock-up looms in August, and the fundamentals are shouting that an awful lot has to go right for SpaceX to justify $225, let alone more.

Our suggestion: separate the company from the stock. One is a magnificent business. The other is a very expensive bet on what 2035 looks like. Size your enthusiasm accordingly, and maybe don’t remortgage the holiday house.

This article is general information and a bit of fun, not personal financial advice. It doesn’t account for your objectives or circumstances, and the author is not your financial adviser. Do your own homework and, before buying anything trading at 130 times sales, talk to a licensed professional.