Uploaded April 2026 | Updated September 2026, 1 week ago
In a world where so many companies claim to be unique and futuristic, SpaceX is the real deal, a package of spaceships, satellites and AI. When he founded the company in 2002, Elon Musk announced that he was doing so to make the costs of going into space lower and to make space travel possible. While the space establishment gave the company little chance of succeeding, it has delivered on the first promise, with its reusable rocket technology allowing for much cheaper launches into space. Along the way, the company has branched out into two other businesses - an internet service business built around thousands of satellites that it has launched into space, and AI, with its acquisition of xAI. As it get ready for an IP0, I tried to value and price the company, albeit with minimalist information, since the prospectus is still not public, and there are no comparable public companies in these spaces. With different storylines for the launch, internet and LLM business, and building on the moats that SpaceX has (at least in the first two), I attach a valuation of $1.22 trillion to the company, an astonishingly high number for a company that generated $16 billion in revenues in 2025. I will revisit the valuation, once the prospectus is filed in the next few weeks, but I do not expect that public filing to change my story line by much.
Slides: https://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~adamodar/pdfiles/blog/SpaceXIPO.pdf
Blog post: aswathdamodaran.blogspot.com/2026/04/to-trillion-dollars-and-beyond-spacex.html
Valuation of SpaceX: https://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~adamodar/pc/blog/SpaceX2026IPO.xlsx
In a world where so many companies claim to be unique and futuristic, SpaceX is the real deal, a package of spaceships, satellites and AI. When he founded the company in 2002, Elon Musk announced that he was doing so to make the costs of going into space lower and to make space travel possible. While the space establishment gave the company little chance of succeeding, it has delivered on the first promise, with its reusable rocket technology allowing for much cheaper launches into space. Along the way, the company has branched out into two other businesses - an internet service business built around thousands of satellites that it has launched into space, and AI, with its acquisition of xAI. As it get ready for an IP0, I tried to value and price the company, albeit with minimalist information, since the prospectus is still not public, and there are no comparable public companies in these spaces. With different storylines for the launch, internet and LLM business, and building on the moats that SpaceX has (at least in the first two), I attach a valuation of $1.22 trillion to the company, an astonishingly high number for a company that generated $16 billion in revenues in 2025. I will revisit the valuation, once the prospectus is filed in the next few weeks, but I do not expect that public filing to change my story line by much.
Slides: https://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~adamodar/pdfiles/blog/SpaceXIPO.pdf
Blog post: aswathdamodaran.blogspot.com/2026/04/to-trillion-dollars-and-beyond-spacex.html
Valuation of SpaceX: https://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~adamodar/pc/blog/SpaceX2026IPO.xlsx
