After Losing More Than $1 Trillion in Market Cap, This Artificial Intelligence (AI) Stock Will Become the Most Valuable Business in the World, According to Elon Musk

Space Exploration Technologies (NASDAQ: SPCX) began as a wager that rockets could be reused, launching into orbit could be cheap, and a private-sector business might be the vessel that carries civilization beyond a single planet.

While this origin story still sits at the center of the company's mission, SpaceX has changed some of its broader ambitions. Before its historic IPO, SpaceX absorbed xAI and subsequently folded rockets, Starlink, X (formerly Twitter), and a frontier generative AI model (Grok) into one vertically integrated moonshot. SpaceX CEO Elon Musk explained the rationale for this structure in a post on X: "You don't seem to understand that SpaceX will be worth more than the rest of Earth if we accomplish our goals."

This sentence is either a generational prophecy or hubristic salesmanship. Investors now have to decide which.

Image source: Getty Images.

A full analysis of the SpaceX IPO

When SpaceX opened on the Nasdaq in early June, shares came in at $150. By the end of its opening-day session, SpaceX boasted a market capitalization of $2.1 trillion -- immediately propelling it among the ranks of the world's most valuable companies.

The aftermath of SpaceX's debut has been less ceremonial. The stock peaked at $225.64 just four days following the IPO but has spent most of the summer learning how gravity works. By late July, shares dipped as low as $108 -- wiping out more than $1 trillion from SpaceX's market value. As of this writing (Aug. 26), SpaceX stock is changing hands around $138 -- essentially in line with the offering price of $135.

Measuring SpaceX's books against the worth of the planet

To be blunt, SpaceX's financial profile makes Musk's commentary look like a category error. In 2025, the company generated $18.7 billion in total revenue while incurring a $4.9 billion loss. While connectivity, led by Starlink, generated $11.4 billion in revenue and $4.4 billion in operating income, it was the only segment in the black.

The first half of 2026 has only accelerated the same pattern. Revenue in the first quarter was about $4.7 billion against a $4.3 billion net loss. The second quarter showed modest improvements across the board. Revenue surged 92% year over year to $7.8 billion, while net losses narrowed to $541 million.

The theme is that Starlink has become a real cash engine, but Starship and artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure are enormous cash drains. Simply put, a company generating low-$20 billion of annual revenue, still burning cash, and spending like a sovereign enterprise is not, by any conventional methodology, a candidate to outvalue Earth. To close the gap, I think SpaceX would need to compound on three things simultaneously.

First, Starship would need to become so reliable and cheap that it makes space exploration a more recurring business. Second, Starlink has to continue scaling across consumer, enterprise, aviation, and maritime markets and would likely also need to enter telecommunications services -- all without compressing its average revenue per user (ARPU) into a commodity ditch. Lastly, SpaceX's AI capacity business needs to prove it can turn orbital compute from a slogan into legitimate contracted revenue that enterprise customers pay for at lucrative unit economics.

How should investors view an investment in SpaceX?

In my view, Starlink is worth owning in the ordinary sense: It has found product-market fit as evidenced by a growing subscriber base generating a healthy operating profit. The rest of SpaceX's equity story, however, is vulnerable to Musk's duration risk. Corporate governance is highly concentrated in Musk's voting power, while ballooning capital expenditures (capex) on emerging -- and somewhat still unproven -- businesses can overwhelm the cash war chest from the company's record listing.

In essence, a flailing Starship cadence or an uninspiring AI build-out that never recoups its cost of capital would leave SpaceX investors with nothing more than a premium-priced telecom-and-launch conglomerate, not a game-changing civilization utility.

Becoming the most valuable company in history could be imaginable if Orbital Compute actually works and reusable rockets collapse the cost of putting AI workloads into space. However, it is not the base case for a money-losing business generating just tens of billions of sales. At the end of the day, outvaluing Earth is not an investable forecast. Rather, it is a mission statement disguised as a price target.

The real takeaway is narrower and more harsh. SpaceX indeed offers a legitimate industrial complex with one profitable growth engine and two enormous call options attached.

With this in mind, I think SpaceX stock is only worth a position for investors who can stomach volatile drawdowns, tolerate a founder who has a history of answering questions with cosmology, and accept that shares could easily spend years looking expensive relative to its underlying books.

Adam Spatacco has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool recommends Nasdaq. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.