Every record valuation is really a bet on a story that has not happened yet.
The price tag is the easy part. A bank picks a number, prints it on a cover page, and the market decides whether the future behind it is worth believing. Most of the time, the story is boring. A software company grows 20% a year, the underwriters slap a familiar multiple on it, and nobody writes a philosophy essay about the cover page.
Once in a while the story gets big enough that the number stops sounding like finance and starts sounding like science fiction. That is usually the moment retail investors find themselves on the outside, watching institutions carve up the good stuff while the rest of us read about it the next morning.
This time is different, and not in the way that the phrase usually gets abused. The numbers are real. They just do not agree with each other.
Space Exploration Technologies, better known as SpaceX (SPCX), is about to price the largest initial public offering in history, and for once, the company has saved a seat for ordinary buyers. The bank running the deal has also done something unusual. It has put its name behind a number so large that the only honest way to defend it is to bet on a business SpaceX did not even own a year ago.
What Goldman Sachs is actually betting on
Goldman Sachs (GS) is the lead banker on the offering, followed by Morgan Stanley (MS), Bank of America (BAC), Citigroup (C) and JPMorgan Chase (JPM), according to CNBC.
The terms are blunt. SpaceX plans to sell 555.6 million Class A shares at a fixed $135 each, raising roughly $75 billion and valuing the company near $1.77 trillion. The raise is “more than triple the size of Alibaba’s” record 2014 listing, according to CNBC.
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Sit with that valuation for a second. At $1.77 trillion, SpaceX would arrive on the public market worth more than every company in the S&P 500 except a small handful of megacaps, including Nvidia (NVDA) and Apple (AAPL), a milestone that was already drawing notice when the rocket maker first filed confidentially this spring.
So how does a bank justify a number that large for a company still losing money? It changes the subject from rockets to artificial intelligence.
Goldman projects that SpaceX’s AI unit will grow revenue roughly 100 times over, from $3.2 billion to $322 billion by 2030, according to 24/7 Wall St. That single forecast is doing most of the heavy lifting. The case leans on a claim in SpaceX’s own prospectus that the AI division addresses a $26.5 trillion market, dwarfing the roughly $2 trillion the filing assigns to Starlink and the launch business combined, per 24/7 Wall St.
Strip away the AI math and the pitch is still formidable. One ticker buys the dominant satellite-internet business on the planet, a launch operation with deep government contracts, and what amounts to “a call option on xAI and Mars,” according to Yahoo Finance. The bank is not selling a rocket company. It is selling the future, priced today.
Related: Blue Origin’s explosion just made SpaceX even harder to catch
Why some valuation experts are not buying the SpaceX hype
The trouble with selling the future is that other people get to check your math.
New York University valuation expert Aswath Damodaran ran his own discounted cash flow analysis and pegged fair value closer to $1.22 trillion, about 30% below the target, according to Yahoo Finance.
Morningstar’s independent estimate came in even lower, at roughly $780 billion, Fortune reported. And the same prospectus carrying the $1.77 trillion ambition also disclosed a $4.28 billion net loss in the first quarter of 2026 alone, Yahoo Finance noted.
When I put the three numbers side by side, the spread is the whole story.
- The underwriters’ target at $135 a share lands near $1.77 trillion, per CNBC.
- Damodaran’s discounted cash flow model put fair value around $1.22 trillion, according to Yahoo Finance.
- Morningstar’s independent estimate came in lowest, near $780 billion, Fortune reported.
There is a governance wrinkle too. Even after selling $75 billion in stock, Musk keeps more than 82% of the voting power through super-voting shares, according to CNBC. Public shareholders are buying the upside and almost none of the control.
How regular investors can get into the SpaceX IPO
Here is the part that makes this deal personal.
SpaceX set aside up to 30% of the offering for retail buyers, roughly three times the slice individuals usually get, Fidelity said. On a $75 billion raise, that is real money pointed at ordinary accounts rather than hedge funds.
Brokerages moved fast to open the door. Fidelity is making the IPO available to “any customer with a retail brokerage account with $2,000 or more,” Fidelity said, down from minimums that had run as high as $500,000 on past offerings. Charles Schwab (SCHW) is requiring at least $100,000 in assets, while Robinhood Markets (HOOD), SoFi Technologies (SOFI) and E*Trade set no minimum, Seeking Alpha reported.
The mechanics are simple but unforgiving. You submit a nonbinding indication of interest, confirm it after the deal prices, then wait to see your allocation. Sell within the first 15 days and Fidelity tags you as a flipper, which triggers a six-month ban from future offerings, according to Yahoo Finance.
Where my analysis lands before June 12
Understand what you are actually being asked to buy before that week.
You are not valuing a rocket company. The fixed $135 price means there is no range to negotiate and no soft open where demand quietly sets the number. You either buy Goldman’s bet on the AI unit or you wait for the public market to test it.
My analysis is that the launch and Starlink businesses can support a serious valuation. They cannot support this one by themselves. Almost everything above roughly $1 trillion is the artificial intelligence story, and that story is a projection, not a track record.
So watch the first week of trading. Watch whether the AI revenue ramp actually shows up in the quarters that follow. The cover page already told you what the bank believes. June 12 is when the rest of us get to decide whether we believe it too.
Related: Navellier to SpaceX buyers: wait for escape velocity
