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Most of the value in SpaceX's IPO is effectively a call option on the company's ambitious space data center plans.
SpaceX is coming to market on Friday, and investors can barely contain their excitement. The $75 billion stock offering is reportedly deeply over-subscribed, with some institutional investors ponying up for $10 billion blocks of Elon Musk’s empire.
There are lots of reasons to be skeptical of the investment — big IPOs tend to sink, the company is losing money, and Musk’s erratic online behavior would be terrifying coming from any other tech CEO — but it doesn’t seem to be slowing anyone down. Tech investors have learned to never bet against Elon, whatever the business logic indicates.
But a dispassionate look at SpaceX’s financial plans can still tell us a lot about what they’re betting on: A business centered around orbital data centers that emerged in the last eighteen months as Musk sought a vision that would unite his conglomerate ahead of its IPO.
In true Musk style, it’s a bold scheme, and one that requires at least three near-impossible feats of engineering: a reusable rocket, a brand-new American chip foundry, and a sprint to build satellites faster than ever before.
That kind of business plan can be difficult to score. This week, two analyses tried to offer a more a sober assessment of SpaceX’s plan — one from Morningstar, the financial research firm, and another from Aswath Damodaran, a New York University finance professor who takes a special interest in corporate valuation. Both exercises find SpaceX significantly less valuable than the nearly $1.8 trillion assessment proffered by the company’s bankers. Morningstar assigns a value of about $825 billion, while Damodaran suggests the company is worth $1.2 trillion.
The significant difference is, in many ways, the result of bolting a world-beating space monopoly to a far riskier AI business. Morningstar’s analyst characterizes the difference between their assessment of a fair value of $63 a share, and SpaceX’s offering price of $135, as a $72 call option on the company’s ability to deliver orbital data centers at the rate and capability that Musk believes is possible.