Some companies go public. SpaceX made history.

When shares of Elon Musk’s rocket-and-satellite empire began trading on the Nasdaq under the ticker SPCX last Friday, they did so as the largest initial public offering the world has ever seen.

Priced at $135 per share, the deal valued the company at roughly $1.77 trillion — larger than Tesla on day one. The stock opened at $150, climbed as high as $176.52, and closed its first session at $160.95, a gain of 19.2% from the IPO price.

Trading volume was staggering, with more than 500 million Class A shares changing hands and dollar volume approaching $33 billion. To put the scale in perspective, at its pre-money valuation, the listing generated more exit value than every venture-backed IPO of the past decade combined.

So, the obvious question for investors watching from the sidelines is – can a company already worth $1.77 trillion still reward shareholders from here?

Image Source: StockCharts

Why SpaceX Stock May Soar Even Higher

I think the honest answer is that it can — but the case rests less on the rockets that made SpaceX famous and more on the quieter business orbiting overhead.

That business is Starlink, and it is the heart of the bull thesis. What began as a satellite-internet experiment has become a genuine cash engine. Starlink subscribers reached 10.3 million in the first quarter of 2026, up from 8.9 million at the end of 2025 and just 2.3 million in 2023.

It operates in more than 160 countries, carries a 63% EBITDA margin, runs at roughly a $1.2 billion quarterly profit run-rate, and accounts for over 60% of total company revenue — and it is the only profitable segment.

Early Street estimates put Starlink’s 2026 revenue somewhere between $15.5 billion and $20 billion, and the business reportedly turned free-cash-flow positive back in 2024. The mechanics are elegant once you see them: the constellation was an enormous upfront capital cost, but with thousands of satellites in orbit and falling terminal costs, the marginal cost of each new subscriber collapses while subscription revenue keeps compounding. That is a recurring, utility-like cash profile bolted onto a hyper-growth subscriber curve — and it’s why some analysts argue Starlink alone could be a premier standalone public company.

Then there’s the moat that makes all of it possible: launch. SpaceX is the only company on Earth that can deploy its own multi-thousand-satellite constellation at scale, on its own reusable rockets, at a fraction of the cost of anyone else. The internal cost of a Falcon 9 launch runs between $15 million and $30 million per mission, a structural advantage no expendable-rocket competitor can match.

The Space segment generated about $4 billion in revenue in 2025, even as the company poured roughly $3 billion into Starship development. That spending is the bridge to the next chapter: Starship is intended to launch next-generation Starlink satellites, enable satellite-to-mobile connectivity, and eventually support orbital data centers. Vertical integration means every dollar invested in cheaper launch compounds the economics of the cash-generating constellation above it.

The wild card — and it is genuinely a wild card — is artificial intelligence. SpaceX acquired xAI, the maker of Grok, in February 2026, folding it into an AI division whose spending is now substantial; the AI segment posted a $6.35 billion operating loss in 2025.

Wedbush analysts have argued that a meaningful slice of the valuation reflects an “orbital intelligence” narrative — the idea of integrating Grok directly into the Starlink network for on-orbit edge computing. This is the most speculative part of the story, and investors should treat it as high-risk optionality rather than a reason to buy. If it works, it’s transformational. If it doesn’t, it’s an expensive distraction that Starlink’s profits are currently subsidizing.

Risks Worth Noting

SpaceX is expected to post its first quarterly results as a public company in August or September — a genuine catalyst worth waiting for. Because the company listed only days ago, there is no Zacks Rank yet and no settled Zacks Consensus EPS figure; the Zacks Rank is built on a history of earnings estimate revisions that simply doesn’t exist for a two-day-old stock.

Which brings us to the risks, and they are not small. Operating losses are rising. But the valuation is the headline concern: at $1.77 trillion, the stock trades at well over 100 times trailing sales, a multiple far richer than Tesla or Palantir.

A 180-day lock-up expiration looms as a potential source of volatility once insiders are free to sell, and the heavy xAI cash burn continues to weigh on consolidated profitability. Add Starship execution risk, the company’s reliance on a single visionary founder, and the early governance questions already raised in Washington, and you have a stock that will almost certainly trade with violent swings.

Bottom Line

SpaceX (SPCX Quick QuoteSPCX - Free Report) is a genuinely extraordinary franchise with a real, compounding profit engine in Starlink and a launch moat no competitor can touch.

But it has gone public priced for a future that still has to be built. For investors who believe in the arc of the story, the smart approach is patience — let the lock-up volatility and that first September earnings print clear some of the fog, size any position with the valuation firmly in mind, and treat the AI optionality as upside rather than the foundation.

The rocket has launched. Whether it reaches escape velocity from here is, fittingly, a question of how much altitude is already in the price.