The proposed SpaceX IPO has stirred up discussions throughout Wall Street. Valued at $1.75 trillion, the company would become the most expensive publicly held enterprise ever.
This valuation shows tremendous investor optimism regarding the future of artificial intelligence and SpaceX’s leadership in the sector. However, such a valuation poses a significant threat. SpaceX must grow incredibly fast in the coming years for its investors to make money on their investment.
The simple question here is: what does SpaceX have to do to justify its current valuation of $1.75 trillion?
Can SpaceX’s Growth Expectations Ever Meet Reality?
To provide an answer to this question, David Trainer, CEO of New Constructs research firm, employed his discounted cash flow method. According to Trainer, SpaceX needs to achieve certain figures both in sales and profitability to sustain such an enormous valuation in the long run.
Here are the results.
As it turns out, SpaceX should be earning roughly $1.1 trillion per year by 2035.
The problem is obvious when considering the scale of the company itself. For instance, SpaceX had revenues of $18.7 billion in 2025 but incurred a net loss of $4.9 billion. It would take raising its income fivefold to move from $18.7 billion to $1.1 trillion over the next ten years.
Doing so for the entire decade will prove to be hard for anyone. But doing the same for ten years for a company like SpaceX would be unprecedented.
One can also look at the final years of SpaceX’s growth graph under Trainer’s scenario. In this case, the company would have to boost revenues from around $718 billion to $1.1 trillion from 2034 to 2035 alone. That means growing revenues by more than $360 billion per year.
It is fair to say that no major firm had done such things before.
As a comparison, Nvidia has seen one of the most rapid revenue growth rates in corporate history from 2024 to 2025, where it managed to add about $85 billion in revenue. However, SpaceX would need almost quadruple that amount in 2035 alone under the Trainer scenario.
Can SpaceX Disrupt the Global Economy Through AI?
In another comparison, Amazon, one of the world’s biggest firms, made an additional revenue of approximately $360 billion in the past years. SpaceX will need to accomplish something like that within just a single year.
With $1.1 trillion in annual revenues, such a company will leave an enormous mark on the world economy.
According to the Congressional Budget Office, the gross domestic product of the U.S. is expected to reach $46.7 trillion by 2035. In that case, the annual revenues of SpaceX would amount to about 2.4% of GDP of the United States.
Not many companies throughout history came close to having such an influence on the economy.
The company’s annual revenues could be larger than the revenues of many industries altogether. It would compete with major parts of the transportation industry and surpass some of the existing industries that contain several dozen Fortune 500 companies.
Can AI Expectations Meet Market Reality?
As supporters claim, artificial intelligence provides a unique chance for that. SpaceX’s public documents mention potential revenues from the artificial intelligence market, which could amount to almost $30 trillion.
Of course, that alone doesn’t mean anything.
But with the very same opportunities come competition. SpaceX has rivals among the leading tech corporations around the world. Alphabet, Microsoft, Nvidia, and OpenAI, among others, are aggressively pursuing investment in technologies related to AI development, AI services, and AI software.
With growing demand, these corporations will inevitably vie for customers and market shares. The competition is expected to preclude the possibility of an outright monopoly on the part of any company and, thus, to hinder its reaching SpaceX-like valuation.
This is the essence of the major risk of SpaceX’s stock.
The company does not have to experience bankruptcy to let the stock price plunge. The firm can develop into a spectacularly profitable business, earn many billions of dollars annually, but at the end of the day fail to live up to the $1.75 trillion mark.
The IPO may become a landmark event for public markets. It may also serve as a test of how much future growth investors are willing to price into today’s stocks.
For SpaceX, the challenge is no longer proving that AI is a major opportunity. The challenge is proving that it can grow large enough to justify expectations that already assume a place among the biggest economic forces in the world.
