SpaceX is set to go public on Friday at a $1.75T valuation.
Analysts are split over whether that’s the right number, and how the stock will perform in the short term—but everyone agrees the space industry is booming.
The market case: In a typical IPO, officials test out different prices ahead of the stock’s debut, and set pricing and valuation after some back-and-forth between underwriters and buyers. However, Howard Morgan, the chairman of B Capital, said this process didn’t happen during the lead-up to the SpaceX IPO, in which officials instead settled on a number without consulting the market.
“It’s—if anything—fully priced, or in my opinion overpriced, for where it is today,” he said on a Tuesday episode of Arkaea’s Space & Defense Market Update. “The fact that the price was not set by the market really bothers me.”
If SpaceX had gone through that normal process, Morgan predicted the valuation would have been significantly lower, in the $1.2B to $1.3B range.
Others, however, argued that the value represents a huge influx of capital set to quickly hit SpaceX’s bottom line, including SpaceX’s partnerships with Anthropic and Google.
That expected revenue, combined with SpaceX’s predictions for Starlink growth, get SpaceX to a $50B revenue run rate in Q4, according to Shaun Maguire, a partner at Sequoia Capital. Coupled with SpaceX’s position in the orbital data-center market, and Starship being expected to come online relatively soon, Maguire sees a huge upside.
“A lot of people are underestimating how quickly things are going to happen at SpaceX,” Maguire said. “This will lead directly to revenue growth, in my opinion.”
Bullish: Even if analysts disagree over how the stock will perform during the upcoming weeks or months, everyone who spoke on the show was bullish on the future of investment in the space industry.
“Space and space technology is a huge part of our future,” Morgan said.
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“That’s one of the ways that I think we’re differentiated from companies that are going to have much more binary outcomes,” she said. “If you’re selling hardware, you recognize revenue when you’ve delivered that hardware. If it fails, that’s the end of the story.”
Symphony Space is getting into the orbital data center (ODC) game.
The VA-based startup, which unveiled its hosted payload satellite in March, announced a more powerful concept today—called Adagio-XL—targeting the ODC market.
“It’s a reaction to the demand signals that we had received from others interested in working with us,” CEO Merry Walker told Payload. “They wanted to take this modularity that we’re doing for payload hosting and to focus it on the ODCs. We couldn’t use our existing infrastructure…so we sized it up.”
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