SpaceX (SPCX): The Largest IPO in History Meets the Oldest Question in Valuation
June 11, 2026, the night before the Nasdaq debut
There is a pattern that repeats itself in every era of transformative technology. A company arrives that is genuinely extraordinary, one that has done things no competitor has done, controls assets no competitor controls, and operates businesses that are already changing the world. The market, correctly recognizing the extraordinary nature of the company, then makes a second, separate, and far more questionable judgment: that extraordinary companies justify any price. The dot-com era gave us this lesson with Cisco, which was genuinely building the internet's backbone and genuinely deserved a premium valuation, but was priced at 130x earnings in March 2000 in a way that took thirteen years to recover from. The lesson was not that Cisco was a bad company. It was that even great companies can be terrible investments at the wrong price.
SpaceX is the Cisco of 2026, except the ambition is larger, the optionality is more genuine, and the price is more extreme.
Tonight, SpaceX prices its IPO at a fixed $135 per share, raising $75 billion in what is officially the largest IPO in global corporate history, surpassing Saudi Aramco's $29.4 billion raise in 2019. The implied post-offering equity value is approximately $1.77 trillion. The order book closed 3.5x to 4x oversubscribed, with more than $250 billion in total demand. Retail investors alone submitted over $100 billion in orders. BlackRock placed an anchor order of at least $5 billion. Tomorrow morning, SPCX begins trading on the Nasdaq.
My job is not to tell you whether to buy or sell this stock. My job is to tell you what the numbers say about whether $135 is justified by intrinsic value, and what you would have to believe to disagree with that assessment. The answer, stated plainly, is that $135 is not justified by intrinsic value under any reasonable probability-weighted DCF framework. It is justified only if you assign near-certainty to outcomes that are today closer to engineering ambitions than demonstrated cash flows.