The most famous valuation professor in America was asked on live television whether he would buy SpaceX at its initial public offering price, and he did not hesitate. “No,” Aswath Damodaran said on CNBC, “I would not buy it at the IPO price.” The answer was predictable; the man sitting next to him in the segment was not. Gene Munster of Deepwater Asset Management said he would buy, and the two men spent the next several minutes arguing about what a company that has not yet traded publicly is worth.
The debate arrives at a specific moment. SpaceX is expected to begin trading on June 12, and the listing has been described by bankers and investors as the most anticipated public offering of the year, perhaps of the decade. The company’s rocket launches, its Starlink satellite internet business and its government contracts have made it a household name without a stock ticker, and the demand from retail investors has been building for years.
The valuation is the contested ground. Supporters of the company have talked up a valuation near $2 trillion, a number that would make SpaceX the largest company to go public in history by a wide margin. The bull case rests on Starlink: the satellite network already serves millions of subscribers, generates recurring revenue that the rest of the space industry can only dream of, and has a growth runway that extends into maritime, aviation and developing-world markets.
Damodaran’s objection is methodological. He builds valuations from cash flows, and his models for SpaceX, laid out in the CNBC appearance and in his published work on the company, produce a number well below the price the IPO is expected to command. The discrepancy, he argued, is the difference between a great business and a great price: SpaceX may be worth $1 trillion in a decade, but paying for that decade upfront leaves no room for error.
Munster’s counter is about scarcity. There is only one SpaceX, he argued, and the market has shown it will pay a premium for assets that cannot be replicated. Starlink’s orbital positions, its manufacturing scale and its head start give it a moat that no competitor has breached, and in a market that has rewarded AI and space assets with extreme multiples, waiting for a cheaper price may mean never owning the stock at all.
The Starlink question sits at the center of the disagreement. The satellite business is the piece of SpaceX that produces cash, and its growth is visible in the subscriber numbers that the company has published. Whether that growth justifies a valuation that rivals the largest technology companies is the question Damodaran keeps asking, and the answer depends on assumptions about competition from other satellite constellations, the cost of launching and the price the market will bear for connectivity.
The timing adds a layer of complication. SpaceX’s listing arrives days after the worst selloff in technology stocks since April 2025, and the market that will price the offering is in a mood to question growth stories rather than celebrate them. A strong debut would be the market’s way of saying the AI- and tech-driven bull market has room to run; a weak one would confirm the bears’ argument that the era of paying anything for growth is ending.
The split between the two men mirrors a wider division on Wall Street. The banks underwriting the deal have built their marketing around Starlink’s cash flow and the scarcity of the asset, while the valuation community has pointed to the distance between the price and any reasonable discounted-cash-flow model. Both sides agree on the quality of the business; they disagree on whether the price is a floor or a ceiling.
For the retail investors who have been waiting years for the SpaceX ticker, the debate is mostly noise. The demand is real, and the allocation process will leave most of them with a handful of shares or nothing at all. For the professionals, the June 12 date has become a test: the IPO will show whether public markets can absorb a $2 trillion story in a week when the market has been questioning exactly that kind of story.
Both men have been wrong before, and neither pretends otherwise; the disagreement is about the price of the future, not the direction of it. That is what makes the exchange worth watching: two serious investors, same facts, opposite conclusions, and a market that will hand down the verdict.
The two men ended the segment where they started, each convinced of his own math. Damodaran will watch the first day of trading with his models and his discipline; Munster will watch it with his conviction that the market is pricing the future, not the present. The answer to their argument will not come on June 12, but the first trade will set the tone for the debate that follows, and the crowd that has been waiting for the SpaceX IPO will finally get a price to argue about.
