Yo team — stop everything because SPACEX JUST WENT PUBLIC AND my brain is already spinning from what this means! On Friday, the company debuted on the NASDAQ at $135 a share with a valuation of roughly $1.8 trillion and closed the day up over 19% at $160.95 — that's some insane momentum right out of the gate. Elon Musk is now officially the world's first trillionaire, with his personal stake valued at more than $700 billion, and thousands of current and former employees are overnight millionaires thanks to their stock options vesting at this level. This isn't just a win for Musk — it means SpaceX is now one of the most valuable companies on earth, which brings us to the question: should it be?
Here's the thing that nobody wants to talk about but everyone needs to hear: most people buying SPACEX stock today didn't do it to fund Mars missions or help NASA land humans on the moon. The S-1 filed in May was brutally honest — SpaceX itself says its space solutions and Starlink make up less than 7% of the company’s total addressable market, while it frames over 90% of its value as orbital AI services for enterprise applications. So basically, SPACEX is now a publicly traded AI infra play wearing a rocket ship suit. Elon keeps all voting rights, but he can't ignore the stock price, and shareholders who invested for returns aren't going to let him spend it all on poetry — they want profit from those data center satellites in orbit, not just launch spectacles.
And this is where NASA gets screwed by the math. The $2.9 billion contract NASA signed with SPACEX in 2021 for a lunar Human Landing System now looks tiny when you stack up contracts worth tens of billions each that SPACEX is already signing with Anthropic and Google for AI compute. We're told Starship can put about 100 metric tons into low Earth orbit — great, but how will they launch it? Will they burn energy on the back-to-back refueling demos needed to keep NASA happy, or fuel a lunar lander prototype which would mean at least twelve tanker flights just for one uncrewed test, or will they simply fill orbits with profit-making Starlink sats and data centers? Every tank is now worth money someone else put in, so the question isn't whether SPACEX can reach orbit — it's whether NASA has anything left on the menu after everyone who actually pays gets served first.
Source: https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/06/spacex-is-now-a-public-company-valued-for-its-ai-potential-so-what-comes-next/
Here's the thing that nobody wants to talk about but everyone needs to hear: most people buying SPACEX stock today didn't do it to fund Mars missions or help NASA land humans on the moon. The S-1 filed in May was brutally honest — SpaceX itself says its space solutions and Starlink make up less than 7% of the company’s total addressable market, while it frames over 90% of its value as orbital AI services for enterprise applications. So basically, SPACEX is now a publicly traded AI infra play wearing a rocket ship suit. Elon keeps all voting rights, but he can't ignore the stock price, and shareholders who invested for returns aren't going to let him spend it all on poetry — they want profit from those data center satellites in orbit, not just launch spectacles.
And this is where NASA gets screwed by the math. The $2.9 billion contract NASA signed with SPACEX in 2021 for a lunar Human Landing System now looks tiny when you stack up contracts worth tens of billions each that SPACEX is already signing with Anthropic and Google for AI compute. We're told Starship can put about 100 metric tons into low Earth orbit — great, but how will they launch it? Will they burn energy on the back-to-back refueling demos needed to keep NASA happy, or fuel a lunar lander prototype which would mean at least twelve tanker flights just for one uncrewed test, or will they simply fill orbits with profit-making Starlink sats and data centers? Every tank is now worth money someone else put in, so the question isn't whether SPACEX can reach orbit — it's whether NASA has anything left on the menu after everyone who actually pays gets served first.
Source: https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/06/spacex-is-now-a-public-company-valued-for-its-ai-potential-so-what-comes-next/