The price was fixed, no range, and the room was told so up front. At the SpaceX investor roadshow in midtown Manhattan this week, the screen showed $135 a share, a number that values the company at $1.77 trillion and makes this the largest U.S. listing ever attempted. The lead presentation ran fifty-seven minutes. It mentioned Starlink eleven times, Starship four times, and dual-class voting not at all. Chief Financial Officer Bret Johnsen took questions from the room.
The bankers at the table are the usual suspects for a deal this size. Goldman Sachs leads the ticket, with Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, Citigroup and JPMorgan Chase rounding it out, according to the amended filing of June 3. At $135, the implied price-to-sales multiple is roughly 95 times the $18.67 billion in revenue SpaceX reported for 2025 — a valuation that assumes the company’s growth story compounds for years without interruption.
The research departments are trying to justify the price with numbers of their own. Morgan Stanley’s analysts project SpaceX could reach $3.4 trillion in annual revenue by 2040, with adjusted EBITDA above $2.7 trillion, according to a report cited by Readhub. Ark Invest, the firm run by Cathie Wood, has argued that the Starlink satellite business alone is worth about $2 trillion. The bull case, in short, is that the market is pricing one company that contains several: a launch monopoly, a global broadband carrier and, through its ownership of xAI, a frontier AI laboratory.
The roadshow’s emphasis tells investors where the growth is supposed to come from. Starlink already counts more than ten million subscribers, and its direct-to-device service is beginning to reach ordinary phones, a capability that threatens the incumbent telecoms where it hurts most. AT&T was downgraded by at least one analyst this week on the argument that Starlink’s expanding broadband service will compete directly with its wireless business. SpaceX does not need to win the telecom war to make the numbers work; it needs to keep adding subscribers at a rate no satellite company has ever sustained.
The skeptics have a shorter pitch. CNBC, reviewing the deal’s prospects, noted that large initial public offerings have a habit of performing poorly in their first year, when early investors who bought at pre-IPO prices are free to sell and the hype that carried the listing collides with the reality of quarterly reports. The company is also carrying obligations that tie its future to delivery: Google has agreed to pay SpaceX $920 million a month from October through June 2029 for access to 110,000 NVIDIA GPUs at an xAI-operated data center, a contract that gives Google an exit if the hardware is not provisioned by September 30.
The structure of the deal does little to temper the risk for newcomers. A fixed price with no range suggests demand strong enough that the company did not need to test the market, but it also means the first trade on June 12, when the stock begins trading, will set the real price. Whatever the roadshow implied, the listing day will be the market’s first opportunity to vote on a valuation that exceeds the entire market value of most of the world’s biggest companies combined.
The company’s revenue engine is real but young. Starlink’s subscriber growth has been the fastest of any consumer service in the satellite industry, and Starship, when it flies regularly, promises to cut launch costs further and deepen the moat around the company’s launch business. The AI piece, through xAI, gives the story a second growth vector that no other listed company can match. What the market will be testing on June 12 is whether those assets are worth what the bankers are asking — and whether the narrative holds when the first quarterly report arrives.
Morgan Stanley’s 2040 forecast is worth dwelling on because it defines the entire trade. A $3.4 trillion revenue company would be larger than nearly every company in existence today. Getting there requires Starlink to keep compounding at rates that no consumer business has sustained for a decade and a half, for the launch business to remain dominant against a resurgent set of competitors, and for the AI investments to produce returns rather than consume cash. None of those outcomes is impossible; all of them have to happen for the current price to look cheap.
There is also the question of what the listing does to the private market that built the company. SpaceX’s valuation has doubled roughly every two years since its early rounds, and the IPO gives employees and early investors a liquid exit at the top of the cycle. The sellers, in other words, have every incentive to price high; the buyers are betting that the growth that justified $135 a share is still ahead of them.
June 12 will provide the first answer. The roadshow was a sales call, and a polished one. The market test, by contrast, is unforgiving: a single day’s trading will tell investors whether $1.77 trillion is a floor or a fantasy, and the weeks that follow will tell them whether the largest listing in U.S. history was the top of the cycle or the beginning of the next one.
