SpaceX IPO Soars. Should You Take Flight, Too?

SpaceX IPO Soars. Should You Take Flight, Too?
You know you want to…
“Never bet against Elon Musk,” Peter Thiel, billionaire investor (Palantir) and Paypal co-founder.
 
“Investing is easy. It’s just a case of what and when.“ Kelley Wright, publisher of Investment Quality Trends.
 
Be sure to watch my videoconference on YouTube.com/NataliePace and listen to my podcast on NataliePace.Substack.com. 

The SpaceX IPO will become publicly traded on the NASDAQ Stock Exchange on or about June 12, 2026, with the ticker symbol SPCX. You know you want to buy it. It is likely that the world will see its 1st trillionaire crowned on the 1st day of trading (Elon Musk), if the IPO comes in at $1.6 trillion or higher, and stays there.
 
However, as Wall Street pros remind us, price matters. So, should you buy now or put the company on your stock shopping list? Will the Wall Street insiders who have been investing in SpaceX for half a century use the IPO to sell high and turn their paper profits into hard cash at retail investors' expense?       
 
I have been receiving inquiries and emails from our subscribers for months, with links to YouTube gurus and social media stars who are weighing in on whether you should invest. The S-1 filing was only released late Wednesday night (May 20, 2026). Any guru who was espousing a strategy prior to looking at the S-1 filing was really flying by the seat of their pants – or using the interest in the IPO to line their own wallets. (Many sell a newsletter subscription and sometimes a scam. The “research” that people forwarded to me have very poor customer reviews. Grade your guru before you read or listen to anything.)
 
Let’s dive into the data to see what the numbers tell us about this opportunity.

Here are the topics I’ll cover in this blog.
 
The Elon Musk Premium
The Qualities of a Successful IPO
A Deeper Dive into the Board and Management
The Opportunities and Challenges of Space Exploration
The Opportunities and Challenges of Starlink
The Opportunities and Challenges of AI
Valuation
Macro Considerations
Should You Buy Now?
And here is more information on each topic.
 
The Elon Musk Premium
Whether you are pro or against SpaceX’s founder, CEO and CTO Elon Musk, the man attracts investors. Tesla is worth $1.6 trillion. SpaceX has had some notable, game-changing achievements in space exploration, broadband and AI. Musk knows how to build and run companies and attract the venture capital to keep them going through a lengthy cash burn period, which is what SpaceX is still in. Tesla posted net losses for 17 years before its first cash-positive year in 2020. SpaceX has been unprofitable every year since its founding in 2002, except for 2024, with cumulative losses of $41.3 billion. In the first three months of 2026, SpaceX’s net loss (-$4.3 billion) was almost as much as the losses in all of 2025 (-$4.9 billion).
 
SpaceX is aiming for a $1.75-$2.0 trillion IPO. The investor roadshow will launch on June 8, 2026, with the share price to be set on June 11, before the first day of public trading on June 12, 2026.  A lot can happen during the investor roadshow. I’ll keep you updated in the comments section of this blog. While the long-term expectations for SpaceX are interstellar, many analysts are skeptical at valuing the company at $1.75-$2.0 trillion.
 
The Qualities of a Successful IPO
In 2004, I went on the Forbes on Fox television show and picked Google before the IPO. At the time many analysts were poohpoohing Google for many reasons, including the fact that there had been an entire Dot Com meltdown between 2000 and 2003.
 
I used the metrics below as part of my analysis to pick Google. If you’d like to see how that analysis works with Alphabet Inc. (Google), read the “Hitch Your Wagon to a Star” chapter of Put Your Money Where Your Heart Is. Incidentally, I used General Motors as an example of a company that would likely go bankrupt, giving it a D-. The book was written in 2007. General Motors did indeed declare bankruptcy in early 2009. That’s how auspicious reading the crystal ball of data can be.

Chart by Natalie Pace. NataliePace.com

So how does SpaceX measure up using these metrics?
 

1. SpaceX has outstanding products. Starlink is profitable. The space and artificial intelligence verticals, while producing breakthrough products with first mover advantage, are burning through cash, with AI accounting for a loss from operations of -$2.5 billion in the first quarter of 2026. Other costs and expenses include -$662 million (space), interest expense (-$664 million) and “other expense” (-$1.9 billion), much of which could be linked to the Xai acquisition. We’ll discuss SpaceX’s path to profitability in these segments in greater detail below.
2. The revenue growth was 15.4% in the 1st quarter of 2026. That’s positive, but not noteworthy. The new agreement with Anthropic will bring $15 billion annually, once it is fully operational. That will usher in revenue growth of 80% over 2025, which is impressive.
3. As you can see above, SpaceX is a cash-burn business. The company has $15.9 billion cash on hand and needs a cash infusion (thus the IPO). The IPO has a target of $75 billion, with projections expected to land between $50-$80 billion. This gives SpaceX runway to achieve its ambitious goals, even if it continues to be cash negative for years to come.
4. Having so many Wall Street suits on the board and having operations at SpaceX cash negative for so long, combined with Wall Street’s Elon Musk value premium raises the risk that this IPO is a liquidity event for insiders to turn their paper profits into hard cash.

 
A Deeper Dive into the Board and Management
The management of SpaceX is very strong, having achieved SpaceX’s game changing recovery and reuse of orbital class boosters, rather than them being burned up or lost at sea after one use (costing hundreds of millions of dollars), as was the norm before the SpaceX innovation. This makes space travel more affordable than it has ever been. The CEO/CTO (Musk), president/COO and CFO are all experienced executives.

However, the SpaceX board is very overweighted with Wall Street whales. Five out of six of the non-management directors are finance professionals. That has a lot to do with keeping the company private for so long and having cash negative operations, which required SpaceX to keep borrowing money. While this is good for keeping a company alive and getting it to that cash breakeven point, other skill sets are necessary in the boardroom for running a $2 trillion company. Donald Harrison, Google’s president of global partnerships and corporate development is a great asset and is the only non-finance executive on the board.

When there are this many finance guys on the board of a company attempting its IPO, there is always the danger of the insiders jumping ship at the IPO liquidity event. That could tank the share price once it hits the big boards. We have seen this play out with a great deal of IPOs, including Snap Inc., Lyft, WeWork, Uber and more. (Click to access my warnings before the IPOs.)
 
The Opportunities and Challenges of Space Exploration
While the idea of making “life multiplanetary” is an exciting dream (for some), the universe is a cold, dark, lifeless place, especially compared to our vibrant, beautiful blue home planet. However, Low-Earth Orbit is being used for satellites for everything from Starlink, to weather and defense application. SpaceX is the clear winner with regard to innovation and reliability. Boeing is under intense scrutiny after its high-profile failure and abandonment of two astronauts on the Space Station in 2024. The astronauts were returned to Earth on a SpaceX ship in March of 2025. According to BryceTech and Ars Technica, SpaceX successfully delivered 86% of the world's total payload mass to orbit starting in 2024 with 82% to 84% share of all global mass to orbit through 2025 and early 2026.
 
Virgin Orbit filed for bankruptcy on April 4, 2023, after failing to complete a satellite launch in the U.K. (The company had carried payloads for NASA, the US Space Force, and various private companies before the failed launch that took the company into bankruptcy.)
 
The challenge of space shows up in the financials. It’s an expensive, often cash burn, business. SpaceX is counting on Starlink and eventually Cloud Services to be the steady money for the company.
 
The Opportunities and Challenges of Starlink
Starlink is where SpaceX is monetizing space exploration. SpaceX began beaming satellite highspeed broadband Internet to mobile phones in 2025. According to the S-1 filing, Starlink has 10.3 million subscribers in over 164 countries. Connectivity revenue grew by 49.8% in the 1st quarter of 2026 to $3.26 billion on a year over year basis. Income was $1.2 billion in the last quarter. There are clear advantages to having satellite internet for governments to eliminate wifi dead zones. According to the S-1 filing, Starlink’s unique capabilities are well‑suited for deployments across “field offices, remote worksites, research stations, drilling rigs, rural hospitals, aircraft, cruise ships, trains, and hotels.”

So, what could possibly go wrong with the connectivity cash cow of SpaceX? In addition to competition from China and Russia, it’s important to remember just how highly regulated the radio frequency spectrum is. (China and Russia are both launching their state-backed broadband constellations.) The S-1 filing outlines the risks, writing:

Our satellite connectivity… depend on access to radio frequency spectrum and authorizations from the FCC in the United States and telecommunications regulators in other countries. Without these licenses and approvals, we generally cannot offer connectivity services in a given market. Acquiring the necessary authorizations can be a complex and time-consuming process, often involving technical coordination, public-interest or national security reviews, and cross-border considerations, including in certain jurisdictions where regulatory processes may be influenced by protectionist policies or preferences. Spectrum access itself is limited and highly regulated.
 
It’s also getting quite crowded in low-Earth orbit. There is a risk of collisions with space debris, other satellites and even spaceships.
 
The Opportunities and Challenges of AI
AI pioneers have high expectations for what artificial intelligence can achieve – from understanding our universe to breakthroughs in everything from energy to medicine and beyond. SpaceX believes that their vertical integration can support AI infrastructure in space [which will] utilize the “virtually limitless power of the Sun.” SpaceX’s AI business (Grok and X) is investing in R&D and burning through cash, like all AI companies. However, they are starting to monetize and have a $15 billion annual revenue Cloud Services Agreement (once fully operational) with Anthropic. That would bring in more than five times the AI vertical’s revenue in 2025 of $3.2 billion. That’s the good news.

The challenges of AI are getting on a pathway to profitability, navigating government regulations, beating the competition, keeping your brand popular and potential liability claims for harms that might occur as a result of “harmful, misleading or illegal content, accuracy, misinformation and deepfakes, bias, discrimination, toxicity, sycophancy, AI deception, consumer protection and notification, products liability, intellectual property infringement or misappropriation, defamation, data privacy, cybersecurity, and sanctions and export controls,” (according to the SpaceX S-1 filing).
​
Powering AI is also a challenge, which SpaceX proposes to solve with low-Earth orbiting data centers. As noted in the SpaceX S-1 filing, “We expect Earth’s finite resources will not be able to sustain the immense computational demands of advanced AI models. Sustainably satisfying this compute demand will require space-based infrastructure that utilizes the ultimate fusion energy source: the Sun.” On Feb. 4, 2026, SpaceX filed regulatory paperwork with the FCC proposing the launch of up to 1 million satellites that will act as self-contained, solar-powered data centers in low-Earth orbit.

Valuation
A great deal of the independent 3rd-party analyst reports I’m reading are concerned about SpaceX’s lofty valuation. (There are many investment banks involved in the IPO. Those bank analysts are in a “quiet period” where they won’t be issuing any commentary.) One anonymous Wall Street insider sent me a text, writing, “When younger, we were required to learn about imaginary numbers in math class. This IPO analysis may be one of the few times such education had a real-world application. This is not to say this stock won’t go up. Imaginary numbers can rise, as one’s imagination is infinite. But what isn’t infinite is life span.”
 
Macro Considerations
While the long-term nature of space, security, internet, cloud and AI contracts could help keep SpaceX’s revenue stable in a recession, the expensive valuation could see the share price drop. Publicly traded space companies saw an average drop of -45% in 2008, during the Great Recession. While no recession is predicted in 2026 or 2027, it’s important to remember that economists are lousy at forecasting economic contractions. Even without a recession, we saw AI and technology stocks plummet in 2022, and again in April of 2025. Learn more in my “Capture Gains at an All-Time High” blog.

Data as of May 18, 2026

Should You Buy Now?
I will be monitoring the roadshow and the price and will update here in the comments of this blog. I will also see which of the funds might be including SpaceX, for investors to consider. (iShares TECB, XT and ARTY might include the company.)
 
Given the competing interests of insiders who have a lot of wealth who would like to sell and retail investors who are very interested in owning, the first day of trading will likely be volatile. Whales tend to make a big splash when they sell, so, be cautious. It might be a good idea to wait for the waves to calm a bit. When I think a price is too high, I put the company on a Stock Shopping List. That way I’m ready to go if the price plunges.
 
Most Main Street investors will have an easier time owning hot companies in a targeted ETF to reduce volatility and risk. Investing in any individual company requires a great deal of wisdom, research and babysitting. If we do invest, it’s a good idea to consider it our Vegas money. If we buy high in a great company, that can be an investment that loses money.
 
Bottom Line
SpaceX’s business model is sound. Its innovations are extraordinary. Elon Musk is a proven executive who’s probably going to be the world‘s first trillionaire in a few weeks. However, even though it’s a good idea to own SpaceX in our portfolio ultimately, owning it when it hits the big boards could be a very expensive lesson in what happens when insiders use IPOs as a liquidity event to turn their paper profits into cash.
 
Should a company with $18.7 billion in revenue and a loss of -$4.94 billion in 2025 be worth $2 trillion? In the short-term, Wall Street prices can be a popularity contest, which SpaceX can easily win. In the mid- and long-term, however, valuation does matter. Buying high, at a 50X forward revenue multiple, is rarely a great idea, even if the company is one of the most valuable enterprises in the world.  


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Important Disclaimers
Please note: Natalie Pace does not act or operate like a broker. She reports on financial news, and is one of the most trusted sources of financial literacy, education and forensic analysis in the world. Natalie Pace educates and informs individual investors to give investors a competitive edge in their personal decision-making. Any publicly-traded companies, funds or projects mentioned by Natalie Pace are not intended to be buy or sell recommendations.

ALWAYS do your research and consult an experienced, reputable financial professional before buying or selling any security, and consider your long-term goals and strategies. Investors should NOT be all in on any asset class or individual stocks. Your retirement plan should reflect an age-appropriate, diversified wealth plan, which has been designed strategically, with the assistance of financial professionals who are familiar with your goals, risk tolerance, tax needs and more. The "trading" portion of your portfolio should be a very small part of your investment strategy, and the amount of money you invest into individual companies should never be greater than your experience, wisdom, knowledge, patience and diversified strategy.  
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Information has been obtained from sources believed to be reliable. However, NataliePace.com does not warrant its completeness or accuracy. Opinions constitute our judgment as of the date of this publication and are subject to change without notice. This material is not intended as an offer or solicitation for the purchase or sale of any financial instrument.