SpaceX Blinks on Valuation

SpaceX has cut its IPO valuation target to at least $1.8 trillion, according to Bloomberg. That's a step down from the $2 trillion ceiling the company was pushing when it filed its prospectus last week.

The company is still targeting a June 12 listing date and aims to raise at least $75 billion. But the retreat signals that the investor roadshow isn't going as smoothly as SpaceX's bankers hoped.

The Musk Problem Gets Worse

The Anthropic lease contradiction is no longer just a disclosure quirk. It's now a potential legal liability with a name attached.

Eric Talley, a professor at Columbia Law School, told CNBC: "The odd thing is that either Musk is correct and the S-1 is materially misleading, or the S-1 is correct and Elon is up to his old hijinx."

That's a law professor — not a cable news pundit — laying out two options, both of them bad.

Recap for anyone just joining: SpaceX's S-1 prospectus says Anthropic agreed to pay $1.25 billion per month through May 2029 for compute capacity at the Colossus 1 data center in Memphis. That's roughly $45 billion in total committed revenue over three years.

Then Musk posted on X — which is owned by Elon Musk, not SpaceX — that the deal is actually a "180-day lease with 90-day mutual cancellation notice." That's a completely different arrangement. It could mean Anthropic walks after six months.

As Talley told CNBC, the discrepancy is "confusing to investors who are trying (best they can) to put a valuation on SpaceX."

Why This Number Matters So Much

SpaceX's total revenue in 2025 was $18.7 billion, according to the S-1. The Anthropic deal — if it runs the full three years at the contracted rate — would add $15 billion annually in an entirely new revenue stream.

If the deal is actually a short-term arrangement that could disappear by the end of 2026, that's a fundamentally different company than what investors are being asked to price at $1.8 trillion.

The revenue implications are central to the valuation question. If the deal dissolves, SpaceX loses a major revenue stream the company has built its projections around.

The Numbers Still Don't Work at $1.8T

Scott Galloway at Prof G Media ran the math before the valuation cut, and it wasn't flattering at $2 trillion. It's still brutal at $1.8 trillion.

At the low end of the original target — $1.75 trillion — SpaceX would trade at 94x sales. For reference, Palantir has the highest price-to-sales multiple in the entire S&P 500, and it trades at 67x sales.

Galloway's team calculated that if you take SpaceX's three business lines — space launch, Starlink connectivity, and AI/data center — and assign each one twice the multiple of its competitors, the sum of the parts comes out to roughly $1 trillion. Not $1.8 trillion.

SpaceX's bankers are reportedly bridging that gap by telling investors the total addressable market is $28 trillion — the size of the entire U.S. economy. That figure includes $22.7 trillion in enterprise applications, which is 30 times larger than the entire existing enterprise software market.

The pitch also assumes every household on Earth eventually subscribes to Starlink.

The Losses Are Real, The Profits Aren't

60% of SpaceX's revenue comes from Starlink, which is a genuinely good business. The satellite internet service has over 10 million subscribers and is growing.

But SpaceX burned $4.94 billion in net losses in 2025, after posting a $791 million profit in 2024. That's a swing of nearly $5.7 billion in one year.

The culprit: xAI's data center buildout. SpaceX spent $12.7 billion on AI infrastructure in 2025 — more than it spent on rockets or satellites. That's the entire premise of the Anthropic lease deal. SpaceX built the infrastructure, now it needs someone to pay for it.

If Anthropic can walk in 180 days, SpaceX is sitting on $12+ billion in capex with no guaranteed long-term tenant.

What Mainstream Coverage Is Missing

Most financial media is treating the valuation cut as a minor calibration. A $200 billion reduction before the roadshow ends signals the market views SpaceX's original target differently.

Almost nobody is asking the obvious governance question: Musk posted material information about a public company's IPO deal terms on a platform he personally owns. Securities lawyers are flagging this as a compliance issue.

The SEC should be asking why Musk's X post contains deal terms that don't appear in a 300-page regulatory filing.

What This Means for Regular People

If you're not buying into the SpaceX IPO directly, this still affects you.

Pension funds, index funds, and retail investors who get swept into the post-IPO index inclusion will be holding this stock. If SpaceX lists at $1.8 trillion based on revenue projections that hinge on a lease Musk himself calls short-term, everyday investors stand to bear the downside when the underlying math doesn't materialize.

$1.8 trillion is still a number that requires everything to go right. The Anthropic deal has to hold. Starlink has to keep growing. The rocket business can't crater. And Musk has to stop contradicting his own SEC filings on social media.

That's a lot of contingencies for the largest IPO in history.