The biggest IPO in history arrives this Friday, and with it comes a paradox that investors would be wise to understand before the opening bell rings.

SpaceX will debut under the ticker SPCX at $135 per share, with options trading set to begin on Monday. The first few minutes are expected to be chaotic as market makers establish price discovery.

Volatility could be extreme, but excitement will certainly be even higher.

Yet, spectacle aside, investors must understand the truth – SpaceX is not quite the company they're being asked to believe it is.

Pricing The Story

The IPO prospectus presents a civilization-scale artificial intelligence platform with a $28.5 trillion total addressable market (TAM). The financial statements tell a different story. SpaceX today is primarily a satellite internet provider wrapped in an AI narrative, with two capital-intensive moonshots attached.

That distinction matters, but according to Vuk Vukovic, CIO of a NYC-based hedge fund, Oraclum Capital, perhaps not immediately.

The company’s headline TAM breaks down into three categories: $370 billion tied to launch services and national security, $1.6 trillion from Starlink connectivity, and an eye-popping $26.5 trillion attributed to artificial intelligence.

AI alone represents 93% of the opportunity being sold to investors, and those numbers are hard to justify. As much as $22.7 trillion comes from "enterprise applications"—a market larger than the GDP of every country on earth except the U.S. and China.

This isn’t a forecast. It’s a storytelling device designed to shift attention away from today’s revenues and make a 94-times-sales valuation appear reasonable.

"When the addressable market is 1,500 times current revenue, management is asking you to price the story, not the business," Vukovic noted. Instead, he follows the money.

A 3-Headed Chimera

From the outside, SpaceX looks like a chimera – effectively 3 business operating on three entirely different timelines.

Starlink is the only segment generating meaningful profits today. Connectivity contributed $11.4 billion in revenue during 2025, accounting for 61% of the total. With 36% operating margins, 10.3 million subscribers across 164 countries, and $4.4 billion in operating income, Starlink is a remarkable infrastructure business and the financial backbone of the entire enterprise.

Then there is the space business itself. Launch services generated roughly $4 billion in revenue, or 21% of the total. SpaceX dominates global mass-to-orbit launches, and Falcon remains one of the most reliable launch systems ever built. Yet Starship—the program behind virtually every future growth ambition consumed about $3 billion in annual research spending and still failed to deliver an orbital payload.

Meanwhile, the AI business, xAI, generated $3.2 billion in revenue while posting a $6.4 billion operating loss in 2025. This year, it could burn as much as $10 billion. It consumes more cash than Starlink produces, yet investors are being asked to value this expensive lottery ticket as if it were a proven franchise.

Vukovic cites Morningstar's fair value estimate of approximately $780 billion—roughly 55% below the IPO valuation. Its conclusion is straightforward. Starlink deserves a premium, the space business holds promise, and xAI represents a material risk of value destruction.

Yet fundamentals do not determine day-one performance. Flows do.

Why The Flow Wins

Goldman Sachs and a 21-bank syndicate including Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, and JPMorgan reportedly attracted more than $150 billion in orders against the $75 billion offering. Vukovic sees oversubscription as an important institutional signal.

"It means they think it'll trade above $135 in week one and they want allocation before it does," he wrote.

Retail investors are also in on the story. Unlike traditional IPOs, individuals can access shares at the same $135 price through major brokerages. Scarcity, celebrity involvement and fear of missing out drive demand independent of valuation models.

Still, raising $75 billion requires capital to come from somewhere, contributing to selling pressure in speculative assets. With Anthropic and OpenAI potentially following later this year, markets could absorb another $150-$195 billion in fresh equity supply by autumn.

But none of those plans make SpaceX cheap. It simply means that cheap may not matter.

"A thin float plus a sold-out institutional book plus retail buying at the same price as the whales is the recipe for an open well above $135 – and none of it requires the valuation to make sense. It requires only that the marginal buyer believes there's another buyer behind him. For a while, there most certainly will be," Vukovic notes.

For investors, the answer depends on temperament. Those seeking bargains should probably stay away. Those attempting to trade the opening frenzy are more likely to be whipsawed than rewarded.

But long-term believers face a different decision. History shows that first-year IPO performance often proves irrelevant compared with decades of compounding. The winners of tomorrow rarely arrive at comfortable prices.

If you believe in the vision, Vukovic says allocate modestly, buy, hold, and ignore the noise.

Because when the flow wins, valuation doesn’t matter—at least not yet.

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