Should I Buy the SpaceX IPO? What Australian Investors Need to Know

Last reviewed: June 2026

"Should I buy the SpaceX IPO?" I've been asked this for weeks now. At work, on Ausbiz, at Saturday sport, dinner parties. My answer depends on who's asking.

If you're a genuine space nerd who loves the science and the future tech, buy a small amount to be involved. If you know nothing about the company and you're looking for a quick buck, give it a miss.

That might sound glib, but there's a real point underneath it. If you genuinely love the space "space", you're likely to have the patience to watch billions go up in flames, like the Blue Origin explosion at Cape Canaveral on May 29. If you're an Elon fan, you're probably patient with his flexible product timelines. But if you're looking for value, this is not for you.

How expensive is SpaceX compared to Big Tech?

SpaceX prices this week at $135 per share, targeting a valuation around $1.75 trillion. That puts it on roughly 93.7 times trailing revenue. Let that sink in for a second.

Amazon trades on 3.8x. Microsoft 11.3x. Even Nvidia, the poster child of the AI boom, sits at 24.5x. And SpaceX hasn't posted an annual profit.

Company	Price-to-Sales Ratio	Annual Profit?
Amazon	3.8x	Yes
Meta	7.9x	Yes
Microsoft	11.3x	Yes
Tesla	16.6x	Yes
Nvidia	24.5x	Yes
Planet Labs	50.4x	No
SpaceX (SPCX)	93.7x	No
Rocket Lab	115.4x	No

Source: LSEG, company filings. Price-to-sales based on trailing 12-month revenue and market capitalisation as at early June 2026.

Now, the space purists will argue this is an unfair comparison. Amazon is a mature retail and cloud giant. SpaceX is building infrastructure for an entirely new economy. Fair point. But even within the space sector, SpaceX sits in the expensive camp, and the only names trading higher (Rocket Lab at 115x, AST SpaceMobile at 409x) are pulling in a fraction of SpaceX's $19.3 billion in trailing revenue.

What is SpaceX actually worth paying for?

The real business today is two things: rockets and Starlink. The Falcon 9 is the most reliable commercial launch vehicle in history, and SpaceX launches more payload to orbit than every other provider on the planet combined. Starlink, the satellite broadband network, is the cash cow, generating the bulk of SpaceX's $19.3 billion in trailing revenue. That business is genuinely impressive.

But the S-1 filing tells a different story about where SpaceX wants you to focus. The company claims a total addressable market of $28.5 trillion. And $26.5 trillion of that is AI. Not rockets. Not satellites. AI.

That's because SpaceX absorbed Elon's xAI business (Grok, the AI assistant) in an all-stock deal earlier this year. The AI division posted a $6.4 billion operating loss in 2025, and another $2.47 billion loss in just the first quarter of 2026. It is burning cash at a rate that would make most CFOs physically ill. The Anthropic compute deal, where SpaceX supplies $1.25 billion per month in AI computing capacity through May 2029, helps the revenue line. But the costs are staggering.

The S-1 also includes projections for orbital data centres, a Moon base, and eventually a Mars colony. Independent engineering research puts commercially viable orbital data centres at 2035 at the earliest. NASA's own probability tables give a crewed Mars mission around a 45% chance by 2040. Elon's "city of one million by 2050" is marketing, not a base-case forecast.

Why are three mega-IPOs landing at once?

SpaceX isn't doing this in a vacuum (no pun intended). OpenAI is reportedly preparing a confidential IPO filing, with a listing potentially as early as September 2026 at a valuation near $852 billion. Anthropic is in talks for a round at over $900 billion and may debut publicly as soon as October. These are the three biggest IPOs lining up in a generation, and between them they could hoover up as much capital as 300 dot-com era listings did in 2000 combined.

We modelled this at MPC. In a base-case scenario, SpaceX and OpenAI alone could absorb $160 to $180 billion in primary IPO capital, index demand, and secondary selling. In a stress case, that number pushes toward $265 billion. That money has to come from somewhere, and fund managers typically sell what they can (liquid mega-cap winners) to fund what they must own (the new benchmarks).

The vibe feels familiar. SpaceX has pushed Nasdaq to amend its fast-track index inclusion rules so the largest new listings can be evaluated for the Nasdaq-100 on their seventh trading day. The S&P 500 rebuffed similar pressure on June 4. When companies are lobbying to change listing rules to suit their timeline, that's not confidence, that's urgency to capture passive flows at the top.

What's the real business underneath the hype?

Strip away the Mars slides and the $28.5 trillion TAM claim, and SpaceX has three actual businesses today.

Starlink is the jewel. Satellite broadband serving millions of subscribers globally, with revenue growing 27% year-on-year. It's the main cash flow generator and the reason SpaceX can fund its other ambitions. If SpaceX were just Starlink, the valuation conversation would be very different.

Launch services remain world-class. Falcon 9's reusable first stage has fundamentally changed the economics of getting to orbit. Starship, the next-generation super-heavy lift vehicle, is edging toward operational status. The launch business has a $15 billion addressable market today, with defence and mega-constellation contracts ramping.

xAI / Grok is the wild card, and it's where the risk concentrates. This division burned $7.72 billion in the first three months of 2026 alone. The Anthropic compute contract provides revenue, but the underlying AI arms race requires spending at a pace that has historically ended badly for everyone except the eventual winner.

What about the public proxies: Rocket Lab and Planet Labs?

Because SpaceX has been private for 24 years, money has flooded into the only listed alternatives. Rocket Lab (RKLB) trades at around $80 billion, which is 115 times revenue for a company with $680 million in trailing sales. Planet Labs (PL) sits at $17 billion, roughly 50 times revenue. Both are unprofitable.

The logic is: "If you can't buy SpaceX, you buy Rocket Lab." And that logic has worked spectacularly for early holders. But here's the thing we keep coming back to: once SpaceX actually lists, does the scarcity premium in these proxies survive?

Rocket Lab has a genuine business. Q1 revenue was up 64% year-on-year, the backlog is $2.2 billion, and the Neutron rocket is its ticket to competing with SpaceX on medium-to-heavy lift. Planet Labs images the entire planet daily, selling that data feed to defence agencies, insurers, and AI models. These are real companies.

But at these multiples, you're paying 5x the current launch market for Rocket Lab's share alone. The narrative premium might compress once investors can own SpaceX directly.

What should Australian investors actually do?

Great companies at peak prices can still be terrible investments. We saw it with the dot-com era, we saw it with the SPAC bubble, and we're seeing the same pattern forming now. The companies are better this time, that's true. SpaceX is a genuine engineering marvel. But the pricing assumes everything goes right for the next decade, and that's a lot of things to go right.

If you're going to participate, here's how we'd think about it. Keep it small, 1-3% of your total portfolio at most. Treat it as a speculative position, not a core holding. And make sure the rest of your portfolio is doing the heavy lifting, because this one won't be generating income or predictable returns for a long time.

The smarter play for most investors might be patience. Let the IPO hype settle, let the lockup periods expire, let the index inclusion mechanics play out. If SpaceX is truly a generational company, it'll still be there in six months at a better price. The best opportunities in IPOs almost always come after the initial excitement fades.

And if you're holding Rocket Lab or Planet Labs as SpaceX proxies, it's worth thinking about whether that scarcity premium survives once the real thing is available. We're not saying sell, but trimming into the IPO euphoria isn't the worst idea we've heard.

Frequently Asked Questions