The largest IPO in history lands, while the crypto space turns into a mess

SpaceX is a great company, there is no doubt about that; but even a great company needs to be bought at the right price to make a sound investment.

Preface: Starting with the Crypto Market's Mess

On June 12, 2026, Eastern Time, SpaceX officially listed on the Nasdaq under the ticker SPCX. Despite the company recording a net loss of approximately $4.9 billion for the full year 2025, its stock did not break its IPO price on the first day as many had expected. The offering price was set at $135, the stock opened with a jump to $150, climbed intraday to a high of $176.52, and eventually closed at around $161, marking a first-day gain of about 19%.

The company's market capitalization surpassed $2 trillion, making it the sixth-largest publicly traded company in the US by market cap. This issuance also set a record for the largest IPO in human history.

Source: Nasdaq Stock Exchange

In stark contrast to the fervor in traditional markets, the crypto space was filled with complaints. Multiple exchanges had aggressively attracted users by offering tokenized subscriptions for the IPO, but almost all failed to deliver on the listing day. The core reason: they could not secure the underlying share allocations in time.

An analysis shows that any platform integrated with Kraken's xStocks channel largely failed to obtain sufficient shares.

Source: Exchange Twitter Announcements

Specifically:

• Binance canceled its tokenized IPO subscription event and issued full refunds, additionally compensating users with an airdrop of SPCXB tokens totaling approximately $1 million, averaging $30 to $40 per person.
• Bybit also issued full refunds and offered an extra 4-day deposit reward with an annualized rate of 10%.
• Bitget Wallet, due to its connection with xStocks, lost all its quota. It ultimately issued full refunds to users and provided about $10 in fee credits.
• Kraken, using its own proprietary broker channel, distributed a fixed small allocation to all subscribing users, averaging about 4.27 shares per person, and issued full refunds for the unfulfilled portions.

In other words, the IPO subscription results from these platforms were generally below users' initial expectations.

The common reason for these failures is clear: platforms that bet on the xStocks channel all failed collectively because the SpaceX IPO was oversubscribed approximately 4 times, leaving underwriters with extremely limited shares for crypto channels. xStocks itself is a tokenized stock service acquired by Kraken in late 2025, and this supply bottleneck essentially originated from Kraken's own end.

One platform worth mentioning separately is MSX (Maitong MSX). During the SPCX IPO process, Maitong acted differently from the other exchanges, continuing to offer users their full allocations, even at prices below the offering price. This actually raised concerns within the community. Maitong explained that it obtained its allocation through Republic.

However, Bitget CEO Gracy then pointed out that Bitget has an exclusive partnership with Republic, implying that Maitong had not reached an agreement with Republic.

Subsequent widespread质疑 arose in the community, leading to suspicions that the source of its allocation was from an "electronic market," along with concerns that the platform might be unable to fulfill obligations, potentially triggering a bank run.

Let's set aside this crypto debate for now. Regardless of whether the subscription channel is reliable, what truly determines the profit or loss of an investment is the intrinsic value of the company and the purchase price. Therefore, the following analysis returns to SpaceX itself, addressing three questions sequentially: Is this company worth buying at its current price? Is its valuation logic sound? And what is the likely price trajectory after listing?

I. SpaceX: A Prospectus with a Celestial Tone

To understand SpaceX (Space Exploration Technologies Corp.), let's start by reading the first page of its prospectus. In the opening of its S-1 filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the company states its mission in a manner almost unheard of for a financial document:

The Company’s mission is to build the systems and technologies necessary to make life multiplanetary, to understand the true nature of the universe, and to extend the light of consciousness to the stars.

Source: SpaceX Form S-1, SEC EDGAR (Original: "to make life multiplanetary, to understand the true nature of the universe, and to extend the light of consciousness to the stars")

The prospectus then explains that xAI, founded in 2023 and acquired by SpaceX in early 2026, has become a pillar within the company's vertically integrated system. The company plans to begin deploying in-orbit AI computing satellites as early as 2028.

A rocket company embedding the sun, computing power, and consciousness into the first paragraph of its prospectus. This narrative strength is itself part of the pricing and the starting point for all subsequent debates.

Sources: SpaceX Pricing Announcement, CNN, NPR, The Motley Fool, June 2026

On the listing day, the stock opened at $150, reached an intraday high of $176.52, and closed near $161 after easing in late trading, up about 19.3% from the IPO price. At the closing price, the company's market cap exceeded $2 trillion, and Elon Musk's personal net worth crossed $1 trillion for the first time. The table below summarizes the key figures.

The significance of this day lies not just in the price increase, but in the masterfully engineered supply-demand imbalance. The offered Class A shares represent only about 4% of the company's equity, with the rest locked up; approximately 30% of the issuance (about $22.5 billion) was allocated to retail investors. In other words, the entire $1.75 trillion company was priced based on trading only about 4% of its outstanding shares, with most sellers locked out of the market – a point that will recur later, explaining both the strong first-day performance and sowing the seeds for future volatility.

II. Valuation Breakdown: Why Dare to Give a $2 Trillion Valuation?

To understand the $2 trillion price tag, SpaceX must be viewed as three distinct business segments, as their profitability and valuation logic differ completely. According to the S-1 disclosure, the company's consolidated revenue in 2025 was $18.674 billion, with an operating loss of $2.589 billion, adjusted EBITDA of $6.584 billion, and a net loss of approximately $4.9 billion.

Financial Comparison of SpaceX's Three Major Business Segments (Source: SpaceX Form S-1)

The first segment is Rocket Launch (Space segment). This is SpaceX's original core business and the part the public knows best, but it is not profitable on the financial statements. In 2025, this segment generated approximately $4.1 billion in revenue, growing only about 8% year-over-year, and recorded an operating loss of about $657 million, primarily dragged down by the R&D spending for the next-generation Starship – which alone cost nearly $3 billion in 2025.

The second segment is Starlink (categorized under Connectivity segment). This is the true profit engine supporting the entire company. In 2025, this segment generated about $11.4 billion in revenue, accounting for roughly 61% of the company's total revenue, and produced an operating profit of approximately $4.4 billion, with an operating margin near 39%. As of the end of March 2026, Starlink had about 10.3 million users, covering over 160 countries and regions, with approximately 9,600 satellites in orbit. The key to its business model lies in economies of scale: once the network is built, the marginal cost of each new subscriber is low, allowing profit margins to expand as the user base grows.

The third segment is the AI business, which offers the greatest valuation upside but also burns the most cash. It consists of xAI, consolidated in February 2026, including the Grok large language model, X platform advertising and subscriptions, and the Colossus data center computing power. In 2025, this segment generated about $3.2 billion in revenue but recorded an operating loss of approximately $6.35 billion – essentially absorbing the profits generated by Starlink.

Source: SpaceX Prospectus

Based on the above, we can draw two conclusions:

1. The biggest driving force behind SpaceX's IPO is actually AI, not "rocket launches" per se. Therefore, SpaceX also represents a significant position within the AI narrative – a major manifestation of the "AI bubble" that many have been concerned about.
2. What SpaceX is truly selling to investors is not its current financials but a blueprint: using Starship to launch data centers into orbit, directly harvesting solar energy to power AI, bypassing the constraints of terrestrial power grids. The company is essentially selling the concept of a "space-grade AI data center," rather than just rockets and AI models themselves. – And the prospectus estimates the company's total addressable market (TAM) at $28.5 trillion, with about 93% attributed to AI-related sectors.

Looking at these three pieces together clarifies SpaceX's valuation logic: the market isn't pricing a rocket company or a satellite broadband company. Instead, it's packaging the cash flow from Starlink, the moat of its launch business, and the long-term vision of in-orbit AI computing into a single narrative for pricing: Starlink supports the book cash flow, rocket launches build an insurmountable capability barrier for competitors, and AI provides the upward optionality.

The question then becomes: how much is this optionality worth?

III. Valuation Anchors: Two Major Computing Power Orders and a Cash Flow Base

A high valuation requires verifiable profit anchors. SpaceX's S-1 prospectus indeed contains several clues that can support the narrative: two signed computing power lease agreements, plus the consistent subscription-based cash flow generated by Starlink itself.

SpaceX's Main Profit Support Points (Data Sources: SpaceX Form S-1, DatacenterDynamics, Markman Capital Insight)

Anthropic's $15 Billion Computing Power Contract: According to the S-1, Anthropic is paying SpaceX monthly for computing power. The amount is $1.25 billion per month, for computing power at the Colossus data center in Memphis. The contract text runs until May 2029, representing an annualized ~$15 billion and a total contract value exceeding $40 billion.

Google's $11 Billion Computing Power Lease: Google signed a second computing power lease. It pays approximately $920 million per month to lease about 110,000 GPUs and supporting computing power, with the term running from October 2026 to June 2029.

Cash Flow Base and Pricing Shift: In addition to the two major orders mentioned above, Starlink itself is the company's most stable revenue source. In the first quarter of 2026, the Connectivity segment generated an operating profit of $1.188 billion, with 10.3 million subscribers as of the end of March. In May 2026, SpaceX raised prices on all Starlink consumer plans by up to $10 per month, marking a strategic shift from years of lowering prices to gain scale towards monetizing its vast existing user base.

Summing up these three sources of deterministic revenue, SpaceX could collect at least about $40 billion annually from them – a figure that already far exceeds the company's total revenue of $18.7 billion in 2025.

IV. Questions: The Fine Print in the Contracts and Astronomical Multiples

After laying out the supporting points, we must also examine the valuation's vulnerabilities. The difficulty for SpaceX to realize this valuation is immense, for three reasons.

Contracts Written Through 2029, But Terminable at Any Time

The two major computing power deals appear to lock in multi-year revenue, but there's a critical line of fine print: either party can terminate the agreement with 90 days' notice. Furthermore, Elon Musk himself publicly clarified on X that the Anthropic arrangement is essentially a 180-day lease, after which both parties hold a rolling 90-day cancellation right. The Google deal also allows either party to exit with 90 days' notice after December 2026.

This means that valuing the company based on treating the ~$26 billion in annual computing power revenue as a deterministic contracted backlog is untenable: A lease cancellable within 90 days corresponds to entirely different cash flow certainty compared to a long-term contract locked until 2029. Any valuation model treating it as a firm backlog is overturned by this fine print.

Price-to-Sales Ratio Near 100x: How Unprecedented is This Historically?

From a multiples perspective:

First, the company is currently loss-making, making the price-to-earnings (PE) ratio incalculable.

Second, using the price-to-sales (PS) ratio common for tech companies, the company's IPO market cap of $1.75 trillion against 2025 revenue of approximately $18.7 billion yields a PS ratio of about 92 to 100 times.

Price-to-Sales Ratio Comparison (Source: Investing.com)

For reference, the average PS ratio for the five major US tech giants is about 12.2 times. Palantir, the stock with the highest PS ratio in the S&P 500, trades at around 73 times. This means that upon listing, SpaceX's PS ratio is about 30% higher than even the most expensive stock in the S&P 500.

Historical precedent is also against it:

• According to data from the University of Florida's Jay Ritter, among 14 IPOs with revenue over $100 million and a PS ratio above 40 times, 12 underperformed the broader market in the three years following their listing.
• Another analysis reviewing over a hundred hot tech stocks found that historically, only about 8 stocks ever surpassed a PS ratio of 100 times, and all without exception experienced significant declines after peaking, averaging over a 50% drop from peak to trough.

So, purely from a valuation and pricing perspective, no matter how you look at it, SpaceX's valuation is excessively high – there is no doubt about this.

What Magnitude Does a Doubling Imply?

Let's do a reverse check from another angle: if someone expects SpaceX's stock price to double or triple again, one must first consider the implied scale.

At a market cap exceeding $2 trillion, it is already the sixth-largest company in the US.

• If the market cap doubles to about $4 trillion, it would approach or even surpass Nvidia, currently the world's most valuable company.
• If the stock price increases five or six times from the IPO price, the corresponding market cap would reach the magnitude of $10 trillion, equivalent to combining the current market caps of several of the largest US tech companies.

Given that the company is still loss-making, its core profit comes only from Starlink, and its computing power contracts are cancellable within 90 days, realizing such a magnitude in the foreseeable future seems incredibly challenging.

This is the source of the quote from many bears and institutions – they scramble for allocations at $135 while simultaneously writing in their models: this price is internally inconsistent.

V. Short-Term Perspective: Index Inclusion Timeline and Passive Inflows

Understanding the long-term valuation doesn't mean the stock will necessarily fall in the short term. On the contrary, due to changes in index rules, SpaceX could see support