SpaceX IPO Share Price Delivers Early Gains on a Stretched Valuation

The SpaceX IPO share price has moved sharply in both directions since the 12 June listing on Nasdaq under the ticker SPCX, leaving returns entirely dependent on when and at what price investors managed to get in.

The IPO priced at $135.00 per share, with 638,888,888 Class A shares sold in total, including the full exercise of the underwriters’ over-allotment option, according to the company’s closing 8-K filed with the SEC. Investors who secured that entry point are sitting on roughly a 16% gain, turning a £5,000 stake into approximately £5,800. The problem is that allocation was tightly rationed: retail investors who applied for £10,000 worth found themselves receiving as little as £2,000.

Those who waited for the open fared less well. SPCX began trading at $150, reached an intraday high of $176, and closed the first session just under $161. With the shares trading at $157 at the time of writing, anyone who bought around the $160 level is marginally in the red. The stock was trading at $225 only weeks before the IPO, which gives that modest loss a sharper edge.

What the SpaceX IPO Share Price Tells You About Valuation

Entry point aside, the deeper question is whether the valuation is supportable at any of these levels. The shares carry a forward sales multiple of around 64 times, and the business behind that multiple is genuinely complex.

SpaceX’s IPO factsheet filed with the SEC shows 2025 full-year revenue of $18.7 billion, up 33% year on year. The Connectivity segment (principally Starlink) generated Adjusted EBITDA of $7.2 billion in 2025, against $3.8 billion in 2024. The Space segment contributed $0.7 billion of Adjusted EBITDA after absorbing $3.0 billion in Starship research and development costs. The AI segment, which includes Grok and the X platform, swung to an Adjusted EBITDA loss of $1.2 billion in 2025 from a $0.3 billion profit the prior year. All segment figures are non-GAAP measures.

Before the IPO, SpaceX had raised only $9 billion of primary equity capital across its entire history to build the Space and Connectivity businesses. The listing changes the capital structure materially: on 26 June 2026, the company also issued $25.0 billion of senior unsecured notes in five tranches, ranging from 5.350% notes due 2031 to 6.650% notes due 2056. That is a significant fixed-cost addition for a business still investing heavily in Starship.

Voting control sits firmly with Elon Musk. Following the IPO, Musk held approximately 82.4% of the combined voting power of SpaceX common stock, with approximately 81.1% of that attributable to his Class B shares, which carry 10 votes each against one vote per Class A share, per the company’s S-1/A filing. Public shareholders own the economics; Musk retains the governance.

Starlink’s Scale and the Road to Profitability

The bull case rests almost entirely on Starlink’s trajectory. As of 31 March 2026, the service had approximately 10.3 million subscribers, up from 5.0 million a year earlier, with coverage across 164 countries and territories. In January 2026, the Federal Communications Commission granted SpaceX authorisation to launch an additional 7,500 second-generation satellites, bringing its total Gen2 authorisation to 15,000, according to Ars Technica’s coverage of the FCC decision. A Starlink mobile service aimed directly at US consumers would put the company in competition with the established carriers, targeting what the IPO factsheet characterises as a $1.6 trillion global Connectivity total addressable market.

Oppenheimer analysts have argued that SpaceX will disrupt that market materially, framing its potential in expansive terms: ‘it will be the modern-day East India Company of space, controlling routes, infrastructure, and commerce of an entire frontier… giving it a quasi-sovereign reach, far beyond that of any ordinary corporation.’ The Starship programme, which recorded $3.0 billion of R&D spend in the Space segment last year, is the mechanism. Reliable heavy-lift capability unlocks the next generation of Starlink satellites and any prospective commercial cargo routes beyond low-Earth orbit.

The counter-argument is that a forward sales multiple of 64 times prices in an enormous amount of execution over a long horizon. Starship reusability and orbital refuelling remain unsolved engineering problems. The AI segment is loss-making and faces competition from better-capitalised rivals. For investors who cannot access the $135.00 IPO price, the SpaceX IPO share price setup in the secondary market is less obviously compelling.

The next real test is Starlink’s subscriber growth in the second half of 2026. If the mobile direct-to-consumer service in the US launches on schedule, the market will have a concrete data point against which to judge a multiple that currently demands a great deal of faith.