SpaceX Stock Just Quietly Fell to $124 a Share -- and It's Still Not a Buy

While investors spent the week focused on a brutal sell-off in chip stocks, rocket maker and satellite internet company SpaceX (NASDAQ: SPCX) quietly kept falling. Shares slid 5.4% on Friday to close at $123.99. That marked a sixth straight daily decline, an all-time closing low for the stock's brief public life, and a level below the $135 price from its June initial public offering (IPO).

The slide has been more of a drip than a crash, which may be why many investors haven't registered it. But the cumulative damage is significant.

Shares peaked at $225.64 shortly after their debut, so the stock has lost about 45% of its value in roughly a month.

So is this newly cheaper SpaceX finally worth buying? I don't think so.

Elon Musk at the White House. Image source: The White House.

Why the stock keeps sliding

There hasn't been a single blow. Instead, several pressures have stacked up.

In late June, SpaceX priced $25 billion of senior notes in its first bond offering as a public company. The notes come due between 2031 and 2056, at interest rates running from 5.35% to 6.65%. Management said the proceeds would repay the borrowings under its bridge loan facility in full (debt largely tied to folding Elon Musk's xAI and X into SpaceX ahead of the IPO), with anything left over going to general corporate purposes (likely including more AI infrastructure). The offering was a reminder of just how expensive the company's artificial intelligence (AI) ambitions will be.

Then came this week's AI reckoning. Semiconductor stocks sold off hard as investors questioned whether the boom in AI infrastructure spending can persist. That reassessment has been a headwind for anything priced on AI ambitions, and SpaceX, which is now part rocket maker, part satellite internet provider, and part AI company, qualifies.

Finally, on Thursday, the company aborted a Starship test flight moments before launch.

"Some of the engines didn't start, triggering an automatic launch abort," Musk wrote on X.

A scrubbed launch is a routine setback. But it capped off a rough week.

Cheaper isn't the same as cheap

What matters more is what investors actually get at $124. SpaceX generated $18.7 billion of revenue in 2025, and it lost $4.9 billion for the year.

Starlink, the company's satellite internet service, is the engine. The segment produced $11.4 billion of revenue in 2025, or 61% of the company total. And its subscriber base keeps climbing, compounding from 2.3 million at the end of 2023 to 8.9 million at the end of 2025 to 10.3 million by the end of March. That is exceptional growth.

However, the average Starlink customer is paying less over time. Monthly revenue per user has stepped down from $99 in 2023 to $66 in the first quarter of 2026. In other words, Starlink's growth is coming from adding users, not from charging them more. That's fine for now, but it could become a problem if subscriber growth ever slows.

The AI business is the expensive part. That segment, built around xAI, generated just $3.2 billion of revenue in 2025. It's also behind most of the new debt -- the June bond sale retires borrowings SpaceX took on to bring xAI in-house.

Now for the valuation. At $124 per share, SpaceX still commands a market value of about $1.6 trillion. That works out to more than 80 times the company's trailing sales, for a business losing billions of dollars a year. For perspective, a multiple of 20 is often considered generous for a fast-growing company when it's based on earnings -- not sales.

Put another way, even with the stock down about 45%, the market is still pricing in a future in which Starlink keeps compounding, Starship works, and the AI bet pays off in a big way -- all at once.

Of course, SpaceX owns assets nobody else has: the world's dominant rocket program and a satellite internet business without a true peer.

And investors will learn a lot soon. The company's first quarterly report since going public is coming, and insider lockup expirations begin rolling off in August.

But owning singular assets doesn't automatically make a stock worth more than 80 times sales. At $124, shares are arguably cheaper than they've ever been -- and still not cheap.

Daniel Sparks and his clients do not have positions in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.