After Losing More Than $1 Trillion in Market Cap, This Artificial Intelligence (AI) Stock Will Become the Most Valuable Business in the World, According to Elon Musk

SpaceX’s IPO (NASDAQ: SPCX) priced at $150 in early June, peaked at $225.64 four days later, and then sold off to a late-July low near $108; as of Aug. 26 shares trade around $138 (~in line with the $135 offer price). Financially, SpaceX generated $18.7B revenue in 2025 but posted a $4.9B loss, with Starlink producing $11.4B revenue and $4.4B operating income while Starship and AI infrastructure remain major cash drains. The article frames the equity case as one profitable cash engine (Starlink) plus two high-upside options (Starship and orbital compute), implying investors should expect continued volatility and valuation risk.

Analysis

The market is implicitly asking whether SPCX deserves a software-style multiple for a business that is still mostly a hardware-and-capex conversion story. The cash-generating piece is credible, but the valuation debate will be dominated by whether Starship and orbital-AI become repeatable revenue engines; until then, every dollar of additional spend has to be financed by a narrower, more cyclical core. That makes the equity behave like a long-duration call option, not a compounder, which is why post-IPO volatility is likely to persist.

Second-order, the real competitive pressure sits with legacy telecom and remote-connectivity spend, not just obvious satellite peers. If Starlink keeps improving coverage and unit economics, carriers such as T and VZ will have to defend rural and enterprise coverage with lower-margin pricing or higher capex, while tower/infrastructure names may see slower incremental demand in edge markets. On the upside, any authenticated AI-in-space workload would be a positive read-through for NVDA, but only as an incremental GPU customer rather than a thesis-changing demand driver.

The contrarian miss is that investors may be overfocusing on the headline mission and underweighting governance and capital intensity. The true falsifier is not rhetoric; it is a sustained inflection in losses, launch reliability, and Starlink margin durability over the next 1-3 quarters. If those do not improve, the stock should trade back toward a premium telecom valuation rather than a frontier-tech multiple; if they do, the current skepticism may prove too conservative over 6-18 months.

Key Decisions for Investors

• Do not chase SPCX here; use any rally back toward the mid-$140s to $150s to fade with a 3-6 month put spread if liquidity/borrow are acceptable. Risk/reward: asymmetric downside if launch or capex headlines disappoint, but keep size modest given event risk.
• Pair trade: long NVDA / short SPCX on any evidence of real orbital-compute contracts. This expresses the view that monetized AI demand accrues to the chip vendor first, while SPCX bears execution and financing risk.
• Watchlist alert on T and VZ: if Starlink direct-to-device or enterprise penetration accelerates over the next 6-12 months, use telecom rallies to underweight the basket. The thesis is slower capex recovery and margin compression, not immediate share loss.
• Falsifier: if SPCX shows two consecutive quarters of narrowing net losses with Starlink operating margin holding firm, cover bearish exposure and revisit the sum-of-the-parts case.