Here's How Much Upside Is Left in SpaceX Stock at Its IPO Price, According to an Analyst

SpaceX is set to debut at $135 per share with a valuation of about $1.77 trillion, raising roughly $75 billion in what would be the largest IPO in history. The article highlights a bullish long-term thesis tied to Starship, orbital data centers, and AI compute, with Morningstar’s bull case implying $154 per share and a $2 trillion value. However, the upside from the IPO price appears limited and depends heavily on successful Starship development and execution.

Analysis

The market is treating the IPO as a pure-space optionality trade, but the real bottleneck is manufacturing cadence, not rocket design. If reusable launch costs compress fast enough, the first-order winner is not just the issuer; it is every downstream compute and connectivity buyer that can substitute away from terrestrial capex constraints. That creates a barbell outcome: early beneficiaries are equipment, payload, and antenna suppliers tied to launch volume, while late-stage hyperscalers may get pricing leverage if orbital compute becomes a credible capacity release valve.

The key second-order risk is that the valuation embeds a very aggressive conversion from technical progress to monetization, with the most fragile assumption being launch frequency scaling by the late 2020s. Any slip in reusability or turnaround time pushes the entire orbital-data-center story out by years, which matters because the market is paying today for revenue streams that may not be visible until the 2030s. In that scenario, the stock trades more like a long-duration venture asset than a public compounder, and the discount rate should be much higher than the marketing narrative implies.

The more interesting trade is not outright direction on the issuer, but relative exposure to the enabling ecosystem versus the halo beneficiaries. Semiconductor exposure is nuanced: AI compute in orbit could ultimately support more accelerator demand, but the near-term winners are still land-based GPU suppliers and networking vendors that sell the picks and shovels of today’s data-center buildout. Meanwhile, the most vulnerable public comparator is the analyst/ratings ecosystem: if the IPO prices rich and then stalls, it becomes a weak read-through for other speculative tech listings, compressing appetite across the venture-to-public pipeline.

Consensus is missing that even a successful Starship rollout does not guarantee economic superiority for orbital compute; the burden is proving uptime, maintenance, and power delivery economics versus ever-cheaper terrestrial inference. That makes the upside highly path-dependent and likely delayed, which is unfavorable for paying peak enthusiasm multiples upfront. Near term, this looks more like a volatility event than a clean long; the better entry is after one or two quarters of post-IPO operational data, not on the first wave of narrative excitement.

Key Decisions for Investors

• Avoid initiating a full-size long in the IPO at the debut price; wait 1-2 quarters for evidence on launch cadence and turnaround before paying for the orbital-compute option
• If exposed through event-driven mandates, use call spreads instead of stock: buy 6-12 month upside optionality while capping downside from a post-IPO multiple reset
• Relative-value idea: long NVDA / short the IPO basket if the market starts extrapolating orbital compute too quickly; AI demand remains real today while the SpaceX revenue bridge is years away
• Buy a small basket of launch-adjacent suppliers on pullbacks as a lower-beta way to play rising cadence; prioritize names with current revenue from aerospace hardware over pure concept beneficiaries
• For momentum accounts, fade the first post-listing squeeze with tight risk: upside is likely to be front-loaded, but the first operational miss could compress the stock sharply over 1-3 months