A $1.77 Trillion Valuation Just Made Headlines—Now Investors Want Proof

Elon Musk has officially become the world’s first trillionaire — but is the $1.77 trillion SpaceX valuation behind it built on real value or big promises?

Story Snapshot

SpaceX went public on the Nasdaq at $135 per share, targeting a $1.77 trillion valuation — the largest initial public offering in U.S. history.
The IPO aims to raise $75 billion, pushing Elon Musk’s net worth past $1 trillion for the first time ever.
The valuation is priced at 95 times SpaceX’s 2025 revenue of $18.67 billion — a sky-high multiple that has experts divided.
NYU finance professor Aswath Damodaran says SpaceX is still unprofitable and puts its fair value closer to $1.25–$1.3 trillion.

SpaceX Goes Public in Historic Fashion

SpaceX has officially launched its initial public offering on the Nasdaq exchange, pricing shares at a fixed $135 each. That price targets a company valuation of $1.77 trillion. The offering skipped the usual process of setting a price range before going public. Instead, SpaceX locked in a single price from the start. The company plans to sell 555.6 million shares and raise roughly $75 billion — the largest stock market debut in American history.

The $1.77 trillion price tag puts SpaceX ahead of Tesla’s current market value of about $1.35 trillion. It also tops the combined value of many major U.S. companies. Musk’s stake in SpaceX pushed his personal net worth past $1 trillion, making him the first person in history to reach that milestone. That is a remarkable achievement by any measure, even if the number on paper depends heavily on where the stock trades after the debut.

Musk’s Wealth Milestone and What Drives It

SpaceX’s growth story rests on two main engines: Starlink and Starship. Starlink is the company’s satellite internet service, which already serves millions of customers worldwide and generates steady subscription revenue. Starship is its next-generation rocket, designed to carry heavy cargo and eventually people to the Moon and Mars. Investors betting on SpaceX are essentially betting that both businesses grow into something far larger than they are today.

SpaceX reported $18.67 billion in revenue for 2025 — a 33 percent jump from 2024. That kind of growth is hard to ignore. The company is also pushing into artificial intelligence applications tied to its satellite network, which adds another layer of potential upside. Bulls argue that SpaceX is not just a rocket company. It is building the infrastructure for a new era of space-based commerce, communications, and eventually human settlement beyond Earth.

The Case for Caution on the Price Tag

Not everyone is convinced the numbers add up. Aswath Damodaran, a finance professor at New York University widely known as the “Valuation Guru,” reviewed SpaceX’s prospectus and pushed back hard. He describes SpaceX as “a company with small revenues and large losses” and says paying roughly 100 times revenue is the core problem. His own analysis puts fair value closer to $1.25–$1.3 trillion — still enormous, but well below the IPO target.

From launching rockets to reshaping transportation, AI, and global connectivity, Elon Musk has once again rewritten history.

With SpaceX’s record-breaking share launch and Musk becoming the world’s first trillionaire, today marks more than a financial milestone—it is a testament…

— SeeRightHere (@see_right_here) June 12, 2026

The 95 times revenue multiple is the number that stops serious investors cold. Most mature companies trade at a fraction of that. Even fast-growing tech firms rarely command multiples this high without strong profits. SpaceX is not yet profitable, which means buyers are paying today for earnings that may not arrive for years. That is not automatically wrong — Amazon looked expensive for a decade before it dominated cloud computing — but it does mean the risk is real and the margin for error is thin.

What This Means for Everyday Investors

For regular Americans thinking about buying SpaceX shares, the key question is simple: do you believe the company will grow fast enough to justify the price? If Starlink keeps adding subscribers and Starship cuts launch costs dramatically, the valuation could look cheap in ten years. If growth slows or competition heats up, early buyers could face steep losses. History is full of hyped initial public offerings that rewarded patience — and others that never recovered from their opening-day prices.

Musk’s trillionaire status is real in the sense that his holdings are now worth that much on paper. But paper wealth tied to a single stock price can move fast in either direction. What is not in doubt is that SpaceX has built something genuinely impressive — a private company that launches satellites, resupplies the International Space Station, and is reshaping how the world thinks about space. Whether $1.77 trillion is the right price for that story is a question the market will answer over time.