Early in my career, I thought I might want to be a stock analyst. The job sounded like the center of the financial universe. You read everything about a company, build a model, decide what it's worth, and be right. So I started down the path toward the CFA, the credential most serious analysts carry. I studied hard and passed the first of the three exams.
Somewhere in the months after that, I realized the job wasn't for me.
The problem wasn't difficulty, though it was difficult. I had simply figured out what I actually liked. I'm a big-picture thinker. I would rather sit with a family and help them work out what their money is for than spend my days combing through the footnotes of an annual report. What pulls me in is the relationship and the planning, the long conversation about what a family is really trying to do.
I still love investing. I just love it from a different seat. These days I get to work alongside excellent investment professionals, many of them CFAs, who do the deep analytical work I decided not to take on. They're very good at it. And watching them up close for sixteen years has taught me something worth passing along. Picking individual stocks well is much harder than it looks.
Which brings me to SpaceX.
A private company opens its books
I've followed SpaceX for years, a little the way some people follow a sports team. It's one of the most amazing companies on earth. Reusable rockets that land themselves upright. A satellite internet network reaching millions of people in places that never had broadband. An openly stated goal of putting humans on Mars. You can think what you want about all of it, but it isn't boring.
This week, SpaceX did something it had avoided for twenty-four years. It filed to go public.
If "filed to go public" is fuzzy, here's what it means. SpaceX has always been private, owned by Elon Musk, its employees, and a small circle of invited investors. You and I couldn't buy a share. To raise money from the public stock market, a company has to file a document called an S-1 with the Securities and Exchange Commission. It's a long, legally required disclosure of the company's finances, its risks, and how the business actually works. Once the offering is done, anyone with a brokerage account can buy in.
The S-1 is the interesting part. For a company this secretive, it's the first real look behind the curtain. SpaceX plans to trade on the Nasdaq under the ticker SPCX, and reporting suggests it's aiming to raise around $75 billion at a valuation near $1.75 trillion. If that holds, it would be the largest IPO in history by a wide margin.
So let's do what an analyst would do, and look behind the curtain.
Three companies in one rocket
Once you start reading the filing, the most useful move is to stop thinking of SpaceX as one company. It's really three businesses bolted together, and they could hardly be more different.
The first is the rocket business. SpaceX launches satellites and astronauts for NASA, the Pentagon, and commercial customers. Its Falcon 9 rocket is the most reliable and most-flown launch vehicle in the world, and reusability has made it far cheaper than anything that came before it. This one has real customers, real revenue, and a real head start on the competition. In 2025 it brought in about $4.1 billion.
The second is Starlink, the satellite internet network, and it's the quiet giant of the whole story. Starlink generated roughly $11.4 billion in revenue in 2025, grew about 50 percent over the prior year, and produced billions of dollars in operating profit. Most people picture SpaceX as a rocket company. Financially, it's mostly an internet company that happens to own rockets.
The third is the ambitious bucket, and this is where the S-1 stops sounding like a financial document. SpaceX states its mission this way:
Our mission is to build the systems and technologies necessary to make life multiplanetary, to understand the true nature of the universe, and to extend the light of consciousness to the stars.
That mission lives in the third bucket. It holds xAI, the artificial intelligence company behind the Grok chatbot, which is now woven together with X, the social network most people still think of as Twitter. Some of this is a real if young business. xAI and X together brought in about $3.2 billion in revenue in 2025. But the bucket as a whole lost something like $6 billion that same year, and its boldest pieces, the Mars settlement and the plan for data centers in orbit, earn nothing at all yet.
Here's the shape of the company, straight from the numbers in the filing.
| Business line | 2025 revenue | Does it make money today? |
|---|---|---|
| Starlink (satellite internet) | ~$11.4B | Yes. Billions in operating profit, growing about 50% a year. |
| Rockets and launch | ~$4.1B | The Falcon business is profitable. The segment runs at a paper loss because of heavy spending on the next rocket, Starship. |
| Ambitious projects (xAI and X, Mars, orbital data centers) | ~$3.2B | No. The bucket lost roughly $6B in 2025. |
| SpaceX total | ~$18.7B | No. The company as a whole posted an operating loss. |
One caveat on that $18.7 billion. It includes xAI and X, which SpaceX folded in early 2026, so the filing restates the past as if all of them had always been a single company.
Ninety times revenue
So how do you decide whether $1.75 trillion is a sensible price for all of this? There's no clean answer, but one rough tool is worth knowing. It's called price-to-revenue, and it asks a simple question. For every dollar of sales a company booked last year, how many dollars are investors paying to own it?
A grocery chain might trade for well under a dollar of value per dollar of sales. A fast-growing software company might trade at ten dollars or more, because buyers are paying for the sales they expect later, not the sales already on the books. The number is a quick read on how much of the price is hope.
SpaceX brought in about $18.7 billion in 2025. At a $1.75 trillion valuation, that works out to more than 90 times revenue. For every dollar SpaceX sold last year, the IPO asks you to pay about 90. Here's how that stacks up against companies you already know.
| Company | What it does | Price-to-revenue |
|---|---|---|
| SpaceX (at the reported IPO price) | Rockets, satellite internet, AI and Mars ambitions | ~90x |
| Nvidia | AI chips, the hottest growth story in the market | ~25x |
| Alphabet (Google) | Search, advertising, cloud, AI | ~11x |
| Boeing | Aerospace and defense | ~2x |
| Verizon | Telecom and home internet | ~1.5x |
| United Airlines | One of the largest U.S. airlines, with about $60B in annual sales | ~0.5x |
The comparisons that matter are the closest cousins. Verizon sells home internet, the way Starlink does. Boeing builds aerospace hardware, the way the rocket business does. Both trade between one and two times revenue. Even Nvidia, the most thrilling AI story in the market, only reaches about 25. SpaceX is being offered at 90.
Look hard at United Airlines, at the bottom of the list. United is one of the largest airlines in the world, with nearly $60 billion in annual sales, jets and routes and a brand known everywhere. The market still pays only about fifty cents for each dollar of those sales. Flying is exciting, capital-intensive, and deeply technical. It has also been one of the hardest industries in modern history to make money in as a shareholder. A thrilling business is not the same thing as a rewarding investment.
Price-to-revenue is a blunt tool, and it's only fair to say so. A highly profitable company deserves a richer number than a thin-margin one, and SpaceX is growing far faster than Verizon or Boeing ever will. Some premium is reasonable. But the table doesn't show a premium. It shows a different category.
The 90 isn't an error in the math. It's the ambitious bucket, priced in. When you buy SpaceX at the IPO, you aren't paying for $18.7 billion of sales. You're paying for a story about what those sales turn into once artificial intelligence, Mars, and orbital infrastructure become enormous, profitable businesses.
That points to the hardest problem of all, and it's one no financial model can solve. Suppose Musk delivers all of it, and suppose people really are living on Mars on his latest timeline. Even then, you don't know that SpaceX is a good investment. A Mars settlement would be an extraordinary human achievement. It would not necessarily be a business that throws off a lot of cash. "Will this work" and "will this make money for the people who bought shares at this price" are two different questions, and people mix them up constantly.
It's worth being clear-eyed about Musk in both directions. He has done things experts called impossible, over and over. He has also missed his own deadlines for years at a time, just as dependably. Both things are true, and an honest investor has to hold them together.
Why I'll wait for the index
This is the reason I find single-stock investing so hard, and the reason most people who try it end up behind a plain index fund. To buy SpaceX on day one, you aren't deciding whether rockets are inspiring. You're putting a price on artificial intelligence, on satellite internet, on launch economics, on the odds of a real Mars economy, and on Elon Musk's timelines, all at once, against a number with twelve zeros in it. That's not one hard call. It's five hard calls at the same time, and you have to be roughly right about every one of them.
I'm not going to tell you whether SpaceX is a good buy. I don't know, and anyone who says they do is guessing with confidence. Depending on how you see the world, this is either the opportunity of a lifetime or a long and expensive lesson. The price could stay sky-high for years on faith in Musk. It could also sag for years if the ambitious bucket stays a bucket of ambitions.
The good news, and it really is good news, is that you don't have to make any of those calls. A company this size will end up inside the broad index funds many of us already own. If SpaceX becomes the business of the century, you'll own a slice of it and you'll benefit. If it disappoints, it'll be a small piece of a very large basket, and you'll barely feel it.
I love watching SpaceX, and I'll keep following every launch. But I'm going to let my exposure show up the boring way, through the index, while the analysts I'm lucky to work with handle the footnotes. I sat in that seat once. This is a good reminder of why I'm glad I found a different one.
If you want the longer version of why the boring approach tends to win, see Good Investing Is Boring and Active vs. Passive.