Cathie Wood: SpaceX $1.75T IPO a Deep-Value Bet [2026]

Cathie Wood has put a number on just how cheap she thinks SpaceX stock already is. The ARK Invest founder and CEO argued this week that SpaceX’s reported $1.75 trillion IPO valuation will look like a bargain in hindsight if Elon Musk’s Starship program scales anywhere close to his stated ambitions, according to BigGo Finance and TipRanks. Her case rests on a chain of math that starts with Starlink’s bandwidth economics and ends at a $10 trillion annual revenue figure for Starship alone.

The claim is drawing attention well beyond ARK’s usual retail investor base, in part because the SpaceX IPO valuation debate has become a proxy for a much bigger question: can rocket hardware and satellite bandwidth actually generate trillions of dollars a year, or is this the kind of exponential extrapolation that made ARK’s Tesla calls famous and occasionally wrong? Here is the math Wood is using, where it holds up, and where analysts say it strains credibility.

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What Cathie Wood Actually Said About the SpaceX IPO

Wood’s comments, posted this week and relayed by CoinCentral, frame SpaceX’s roughly $1.75 trillion valuation at IPO as a starting point rather than a ceiling. Her argument is not that SpaceX is cheap today on conventional metrics. It is that the company’s future Starship-driven revenue could dwarf that valuation so completely that the IPO price itself becomes irrelevant in a few years.

In the verified quote carried by TipRanks, Cathie Wood, founder and CEO of ARK Invest, said: “If SpaceX achieves this goal, its $1.75 trillion IPO will be considered, in hindsight, a deep value opportunity.” The goal she is referring to is Musk’s stated target of 10,000 Starship flights per year by 2030, a cadence that is itself drawn from Musk’s own public comments rather than confirmed SpaceX guidance.

That distinction matters. Wood is not claiming SpaceX has committed to 10,000 annual flights, or that $10 trillion is a company forecast. She is running a what-if scenario, and the SpaceX IPO valuation debate now hinges on how plausible that scenario actually is.

The Math Behind the $10 Trillion Call

The calculation traces back to ARK Invest analyst Sam Korus, who estimates that Starlink monetizes roughly $19 million annually for every terabit per second (Tbps) of network capacity it operates, a figure cited across multiple outlets including TipRanks. That per-Tbps revenue rate is the load-bearing assumption in the entire model. Every other number in Wood’s thesis is a multiple of it.

From there, the math moves to hardware. A single Starship launch carrying next-generation Starlink satellites is estimated to add approximately 61 Tbps of network capacity in one flight. Multiply that capacity by Korus’s $19 million-per-Tbps rate, and a single Starship launch could theoretically generate close to $1 billion in annual recurring revenue once that capacity comes online and is sold to customers.

That $1 billion-per-launch figure is the number Wood then scales up using Musk’s cadence target. If SpaceX reaches 10,000 Starship flights a year by 2030, and if each of those flights deployed the same class of Starlink hardware, the arithmetic produces $10 trillion in annual revenue. It is worth repeating that the 10,000-flights assumption, the idea that all of those flights would carry Starlink payloads, and the resulting $10 trillion figure are all extrapolations rather than confirmed company projections.

Step in the Model	Figure Used	Status
Starlink revenue per Tbps of capacity	~$19 million/year	ARK Invest estimate (Sam Korus)
Capacity added per Starship launch (next-gen satellites)	~61 Tbps	ARK Invest estimate
Implied revenue per Starship launch	~$1 billion/year	ARK Invest calculation
Musk’s targeted annual flight cadence by 2030	10,000 flights/year	Stated goal, not confirmed guidance
Extrapolated annual Starship revenue at full cadence	$10 trillion	Wood’s extrapolation
SpaceX valuation cited at IPO	$1.75 trillion	Reported IPO valuation

Even skeptics of the $10 trillion endpoint tend to agree the first few rungs of the ladder are grounded in something real: Starlink is already a functioning, revenue-generating business, and Starship’s payload capacity is a specification SpaceX has published and demonstrated in flight tests. The leap happens at the cadence assumption, where a hardware production and launch-site throughput problem gets treated as a solved variable.

Why Starlink Hardware Is the Real Engine of This Forecast

It is easy to read the SpaceX IPO valuation story as a pure financial argument, but the underlying bet is really about hardware throughput. Wood’s model does not assume SpaceX prints money by launching more rockets in the abstract. It assumes each Starship flight is a delivery vehicle for a specific payload: next-generation Starlink satellites with meaningfully more bandwidth capacity per unit than the current constellation.

That is why the 61 Tbps-per-launch figure matters more than the launch count itself. If next-gen satellite hardware under-delivers on capacity, or if ground-station and spectrum constraints cap how much of that capacity can actually be sold to paying customers, the $19 million-per-Tbps rate becomes the ceiling on revenue regardless of how many Starships fly. The forecast is, at its core, a satellite hardware production and bandwidth-monetization bet wrapped in a rocket-cadence headline.

SpaceX’s recent launch cadence offers a data point on the operational side of this question. The company has continued routine Starlink deployment missions, including a Falcon 9 flight that placed 27 additional Starlink satellites into orbit from California, underscoring that satellite production and deployment remain an active, scaling part of the business even as Starship itself is the vehicle Wood’s forecast depends on for the next leap in capacity.

SpaceX’s $1.75 Trillion IPO: How We Got Here

SpaceX’s public listing priced at $135 per share, according to Investor’s Business Daily, which has tracked the stock, trading under the ticker SPCX, through its first months on the market. That IPO pricing is the reference point Wood uses when she says the $1.75 trillion figure could look cheap in hindsight: she is not arguing the stock is cheap today by conventional metrics, but that the IPO price itself will look low once Starship revenue scales.

On conventional terms, SpaceX is not priced like a bargain. Reporting from Ground News notes that the stock trades at a price-to-sales ratio near 85, a multiple that by traditional equity-valuation standards is extreme even for a high-growth company. That is precisely the tension in Wood’s argument: she is asking investors to look past a seemingly rich multiple today in exchange for a revenue trajectory that, if realized, would make today’s price irrelevant.

SPCX Stock Performance Since the Public Listing

SPCX shares have not moved in a straight line since the IPO. The stock closed below its $135 IPO price for the first time several weeks after listing, before rebounding, according to Investor’s Business Daily. The outlet also reported that ARK Invest used that dip as a buying opportunity, purchasing additional SPCX shares for its flagship fund during the period when the stock traded under its listing price.

By mid-August, shares had reclaimed the $135 level and traded modestly above it following an earnings update and a share-lockup unlock event, with Asianet Newsable reporting the stock changing hands around the $139 range. That recovery pattern, a dip below issue price followed by a rebound on earnings, is a fairly ordinary post-IPO arc, but it is the backdrop against which Wood’s much larger, decade-out forecast is being made.

Milestone	Price / Detail	Source
IPO listing price	$135 per share	Investor’s Business Daily
First close below IPO price	Below $135, several weeks post-IPO	Investor’s Business Daily
ARK Invest buys the dip	Additional SPCX shares added to ARKK	Investor’s Business Daily
Reclaims IPO price post-earnings	Back above $135	Investor’s Business Daily
Trading range after rebound	Around $139	Asianet Newsable
Price-to-sales ratio cited	~85x	Ground News

ARK Invest’s Pattern With SpaceX Stock

ARK Invest has made SpaceX one of its largest holdings across multiple funds since the company’s listing, according to Asianet Newsable. The firm’s behavior around the stock, adding shares specifically during the post-IPO dip below $135, fits a pattern familiar to anyone who has followed ARK’s approach to high-conviction, high-volatility names: buy more when the market gets nervous, and defend the position publicly with a long-dated revenue thesis rather than near-term valuation comparisons.

That is exactly the playbook on display with the Starship math. Wood is not pointing to next quarter’s numbers. She is pointing to a 2030 cadence target and asking investors to hold the stock long enough to find out whether Musk’s hardware and launch-site throughput can actually catch up to his own public ambitions.

Elon Musk’s 10,000-Flights Goal, and the Gap Between Ambition and Infrastructure

Musk’s goal of 10,000 Starship flights per year by 2030 is the single most load-bearing, and most unconfirmed, number in the entire forecast. Reports describe it explicitly as an ambitious target rather than company guidance SpaceX has formally committed to in a filing or investor call. For context, even a highly reusable rocket fleet flying at that cadence would mean roughly 27 Starship flights every single day across SpaceX’s launch sites, a tempo that has no precedent in spaceflight history at any scale, let alone for a vehicle class as large as Starship.

SpaceX’s own flight-test program for Starship has been the subject of close market attention this year. Investment analysts have weighed in on the vehicle’s progress and its implications for SpaceX’s broader valuation, including coverage of Morgan Stanley’s view on upside tied to the Starship flight-test program. The 10,000-flights figure Wood uses sits well beyond anything currently demonstrated, which is why her own framing treats it as a goal rather than a forecast.

Competitive Landscape: SpaceX’s Lead in Launch and Satellite Hardware

Part of what makes Wood’s thesis plausible to some investors, even at its most extreme endpoint, is the lack of a comparable competitor at SpaceX’s scale. Europe’s answer to reusable, high-cadence launch is still in its early stages: Isar Aerospace‘s Spectrum rocket reaching orbit this year was treated as a milestone precisely because it represents a fraction of the launch capability SpaceX already operates. Other players, including established launch providers and newer entrants pursuing reusable hardware, remain well behind SpaceX’s demonstrated flight cadence and satellite production volume.

That competitive gap does not validate the $10 trillion figure, but it does explain why analysts are willing to engage with a scenario this extreme rather than dismiss it outright. SpaceX is not being asked to out-execute a close rival. It is being asked to out-execute its own historical cadence by an order of magnitude, with no competitor positioned to contest the market if it succeeds.

Skeptics Push Back on the $10 Trillion Figure

Not every analyst reading the same numbers reaches Wood’s conclusion. Coverage from Ground News frames the debate as genuinely split, noting that other market commentators look at SpaceX’s roughly 85x price-to-sales ratio and see a richly priced stock rather than a deep-value opportunity, even before getting to the Starship cadence assumptions.

The core of the skeptical case is straightforward: a revenue model that depends on hitting a flight cadence with no historical precedent, deploying hardware that has not yet been mass-produced at that scale, and selling bandwidth at a flat per-Tbps rate assumed to hold for years, carries a lot of assumptions stacked on top of each other. Each individual assumption is defensible in isolation. Multiplied together, small errors compound into a forecast that could be off by trillions of dollars in either direction.

Historical Context: ARK’s Track Record With Bold Extrapolations

Wood built ARK Invest’s reputation on exactly this style of forecast: take a technology’s current unit economics, apply an aggressive adoption curve, and arrive at a valuation that looks implausible until, in some cases, it is not. That approach produced some of ARK’s most celebrated early calls and some of its most criticized later ones, as high-conviction positions swung through periods of sharp outperformance and equally sharp drawdowns.

The SpaceX IPO valuation call fits squarely into that pattern. It is built on a real, cited analyst estimate (Korus’s $19 million-per-Tbps figure), a real hardware specification (the roughly 61 Tbps per launch estimate), and a real public target (Musk’s 10,000-flights goal), then compounds all three into a headline number large enough to dominate a news cycle. Whether that compounding produces insight or noise depends entirely on how close SpaceX actually gets to the cadence assumption, which will not be knowable for years.

Market Impact: What This Means for Space-Economy Investors

For public-market investors, the immediate impact of Wood’s comments is sentiment rather than mechanics. SpaceX’s shares trade on secondary markets following its public listing, and high-profile bull cases from a manager with ARK’s visibility tend to move retail interest even when the thesis is explicitly framed as a long-dated, conditional scenario rather than a near-term catalyst.

The broader market impact may be felt more in how satellite-communications and launch-services companies get valued going forward. If investors start pricing hardware-and-bandwidth businesses on a per-Tbps monetization basis the way Korus’s framework does, that methodology could spread to how analysts model competing satellite constellations and launch providers, not just SpaceX. It also raises the bar for what counts as a credible long-term forecast in the space sector: a $10 trillion headline, even heavily caveated, resets the scale of the conversation.

What Would Have to Go Right for Wood’s Scenario to Play Out

Several discrete things would need to hold simultaneously for the $10 trillion figure to become anything more than a thought experiment. Starship would need to reach a flight cadence roughly two orders of magnitude above anything demonstrated to date. Next-generation Starlink satellite hardware would need to actually deliver the estimated 61 Tbps of usable capacity per launch, not just theoretical capacity. Ground infrastructure, spectrum allocation, and customer demand would all need to scale fast enough to absorb and pay for that capacity. And the $19 million-per-Tbps monetization rate would need to hold, or improve, even as supply expands dramatically, which is not how most bandwidth markets behave as supply floods in.

Any one of those links breaking, a production bottleneck on next-gen satellites, a regulatory delay on spectrum, a launch-site throughput ceiling, collapses the forecast toward a fraction of $10 trillion. That is not a reason to dismiss the thesis outright, but it is the honest list of what Wood’s math is actually betting on.

Five Predictions for the SpaceX Valuation Debate

SPCX will continue trading in a volatile band around its $135 IPO reference price through 2026 as investors wait for concrete Starship cadence data rather than forecasts.
ARK Invest will keep SpaceX among its largest fund holdings and will likely publish further Starlink capacity-monetization research to defend the thesis.
Rival analysts and outlets will continue to publicly challenge the $10 trillion figure specifically, treating it as the headline number to debate rather than the underlying $19 million-per-Tbps assumption.
SpaceX’s actual Starship flight cadence through 2027 will be the single most-watched data point for validating or deflating Wood’s scenario, more than any near-term earnings release.
Other satellite and launch companies will increasingly be measured against a per-Tbps monetization framework in analyst coverage, regardless of whether they reach anything close to SpaceX’s scale.

How This Compares to Other Musk-Adjacent Valuation Debates

This is not the first time a Musk-run company’s valuation has hinged on a future scenario rather than current financials. Tesla’s robotaxi ambitions have drawn similar scrutiny from regulators and analysts alike, including recent attention on how Tesla’s autonomous-driving plans are being reviewed by federal safety regulators. The pattern across Musk’s companies is consistent: public, ambitious targets get set first, and the market then spends years debating whether the targets or the skeptics were closer to right.

The difference with SpaceX is scale. A $10 trillion annual revenue figure, even as a conditional extrapolation, is larger than the current market capitalization of nearly every public company on earth combined with room to spare. That is precisely why the SpaceX IPO valuation story has generated so much attention this week: it is not a modest bull case, it is one of the largest revenue extrapolations ever attached to a single company’s single product line.

Frequently Asked Questions

What did Cathie Wood say about SpaceX’s IPO valuation?
Wood argued that SpaceX’s reported $1.75 trillion IPO valuation could look like a bargain in hindsight if the company’s Starship program scales toward Elon Musk’s stated goal of 10,000 flights per year by 2030, a scenario she calculated could produce roughly $10 trillion in annual revenue.

How did ARK Invest calculate the $10 trillion figure?
ARK analyst Sam Korus estimated that Starlink generates about $19 million annually per terabit per second of network capacity. A single Starship launch carrying next-generation Starlink satellites is estimated to add around 61 Tbps of capacity, implying roughly $1 billion in annual revenue per launch. Multiplying that by Musk’s 10,000-flights-per-year target produces the $10 trillion figure.

Is SpaceX actually planning 10,000 Starship flights per year?
Reports describe the 10,000-flights-per-year-by-2030 figure as a goal Musk has stated publicly, not confirmed SpaceX guidance or a committed company forecast.

What was SpaceX’s IPO price per share?
SpaceX’s public listing priced at $135 per share, according to Investor’s Business Daily, which has tracked the stock under the ticker SPCX through its early trading history.

Has SPCX stock traded below its IPO price?
Yes. Investor’s Business Daily reported that SPCX closed below its $135 IPO price for the first time several weeks after listing, before rebounding above that level following an earnings update and a share-lockup unlock.

Why do some analysts disagree with Cathie Wood’s SpaceX thesis?
Ground News reported that skeptics point to SpaceX’s roughly 85x price-to-sales ratio as evidence the stock is richly valued on current metrics, separate from the question of whether Wood’s long-term Starship revenue scenario ever materializes.

Is the $10 trillion figure a SpaceX company forecast?
No. Reporting on the story identifies the $10 trillion figure as Wood’s own extrapolation built from ARK Invest’s Starlink capacity-monetization estimates and Musk’s publicly stated flight-cadence goal, not a forecast issued by SpaceX itself.

What would need to happen for the Starship revenue forecast to come true?
SpaceX would need to scale Starship flight cadence by roughly two orders of magnitude from current levels, next-generation Starlink satellites would need to deliver their estimated bandwidth capacity in practice, and the $19 million-per-Tbps monetization rate would need to hold even as global satellite bandwidth supply expands sharply.

Cathie Wood Calls SpaceX a $10T Deep-Value Bet [2026]