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SpaceX's "Century IPO" valuation raises further doubts!

SpaceX's "Century IPO (Initial Public Offering)" will debut this Friday (June 12), and although the market is eagerly anticipating it, investors are increasingly questioning whether the company's $1.77 trillion target valuation is justified.

The latest skeptical voice comes from Aswath Damodaran, a professor at New York University's Stern School of Business, known as the "Valuation Dean." He believes the company's value is actually much lower, estimating SpaceX's true valuation at around $1.3 trillion.

Elon Musk's SpaceX will officially list on Nasdaq this Friday. The company has set an issue price of $135 per share, aiming to raise approximately $75 billion by selling about 556 million shares, with a valuation potentially reaching $1.77 trillion.

The company's business is unusually diverse, covering rockets, satellite communications, and AI. Due to Musk's significant personal influence and the broad scope of its operations, its fair valuation has been a hot topic of debate. Financial data shows that the company's revenue is projected to grow 33% in 2025 to $18.67 billion; however, net losses remain high at $4.94 billion.

Damodaran elaborated on his analysis in a podcast. He pointed out that the main source of disagreement is SpaceX's assumptions about the potential scale of its AI business, which includes xAI and the Grok chatbot, the latter being a product developed by xAI, which the company acquired earlier this year.

In the IPO filing, SpaceX estimates the potential market size of its AI business at about $26 trillion, accounting for the vast majority of the company's projected total market size of $28.5 trillion. Damodaran stated that these assumptions are overly optimistic.

For investors, this debate highlights a core issue: whether SpaceX's valuation is based on fundamentals or on expectations of future AI growth. This IPO is likely to be one of the largest in history. The answer will not only influence SpaceX's post-listing performance but also affect market perceptions of other high-growth tech and AI companies, which are currently also overvalued.

Damodaran built his valuation model by separately assessing SpaceX's three core businesses—rocket launches, Starlink satellite internet services, and artificial intelligence. He evaluated each business unit's market opportunity, potential market share, and profit margins. He considers AI to be the company's least mature and furthest from profitability.

Although Damodaran believes SpaceX's valuation is below its proposed IPO price, he also stated that the stock could still perform well after listing. Given the company's notoriety and investor enthusiasm, he suggested that the stock price might be more influenced by market momentum and sentiment than traditional valuation metrics.

In fact, besides Damodaran, several authoritative institutions and analysts have also provided valuations significantly below the IPO target:

Morningstar: assigns a fair value of about $780 billion, only half of the IPO goal. They believe the xAI business could become a "value destroyer" and, in pessimistic scenarios, could lead to substantial losses.

Danish pension fund AkademikerPension: has blacklisted SpaceX as an investment, arguing that its reasonable valuation should not exceed $1 trillion, and criticized governance issues within the company.