HAWTHORNE, CA — In a stunning development that finance experts described as “inevitable once everyone remembered space has fewer parking regulations,” SpaceX has reportedly become more valuable than Tesla after investors concluded that selling internet from orbit, launching everyone else’s rockets, and eventually turning the sky into a subscription service may be a slightly bigger business than selling cars to people who still complain about panel gaps on Reddit.
Analysts say the shift happened when Wall Street looked at Tesla and said, “Okay, electric vehicles, autonomous driving, robotaxis, energy storage, humanoid robots—very exciting,” then looked at SpaceX and said, “Wait, this company owns the road to space?”
That, experts confirmed, is the kind of sentence that makes venture capitalists start speaking in tongues.
For years, Tesla held the crown as the ultimate Elon Musk valuation thought experiment: part car company, part battery company, part AI company, part “what if your sedan had patch notes?” But SpaceX has now entered the conversation with an even more intoxicating investor pitch: What if Comcast, FedEx, AWS, Boeing, NASA, and your local county zoning board all had to ask one company nicely before doing anything above 40,000 feet?
The answer, according to private markets, is: $1.7 trillion, please.
The main driver is Starlink, SpaceX’s satellite internet business, which has transformed from “cool rural broadband idea” into “what if the planet had Wi-Fi, but owned by one guy who posts like a divorced wizard at 2 a.m.” Starlink is especially attractive because unlike terrestrial internet providers, it does not need to dig trenches, negotiate with municipalities, or pretend that bundling cable TV is still a moral act.
Instead, Starlink simply places thousands of satellites into orbit and whispers to Earth: “You may now log in.”
Investors are reportedly thrilled by the idea of a global broadband network that can reach rural homes, ships, planes, war zones, oil rigs, disaster areas, and anyone whose current internet provider’s customer service menu begins with “Please listen carefully, as our options have recently changed.”
Even more exciting is SpaceX’s launch business, where the company has achieved what economists technically refer to as “being the only adult in the room.” While other aerospace companies continue building rockets using a process best described as “heritage PowerPoint with rivets,” SpaceX launches frequently, lands boosters like reusable sci-fi soda cans, and has made the phrase “commercial space launch” sound less like a government grant hallucination.
Competitors insist they are catching up, though many are still in the promising stage known as “renderings.”
The valuation gets even stranger—and more Wall Street-friendly—when you add the next big pitch: space-based AI and cloud infrastructure. Because apparently Earth-based data centers are not enough anymore. They require land, water, electricity, cooling, permits, and the awkward realization that every AI chatbot may be powered by a building in Ohio sweating like a linebacker.
SpaceX’s implied argument is simple: why not put compute infrastructure in orbit, where the cooling is free, the real estate is infinite, and nobody from the homeowners association can complain that your GPU cluster is “not in keeping with the character of the neighborhood”?
Skeptics point out that orbital data centers come with minor challenges, including radiation, latency, debris, launch costs, maintenance, energy management, and the fact that fixing a server may require a rocket. Bulls counter that this is exactly why the valuation should be higher.
“Tesla makes cars, and cars have customers,” said one analyst. “SpaceX makes infrastructure for civilization’s expansion beyond Earth. Also, and this is important, no one can key your satellite.”
The comparison with Tesla is especially brutal because Tesla’s dream is still trapped in the messy physical world of traffic, insurance, recalls, consumer demand, interest rates, government incentives, and people asking why their $70,000 vehicle made a fart noise during a software update.
SpaceX, by contrast, operates in space, where there are no dealerships, no test drives, no union negotiations with Mars, and no guy named Todd insisting he can get a better price if you throw in all-weather mats.
Tesla has to convince millions of individual consumers to buy cars. SpaceX only has to convince governments, militaries, airlines, shipping companies, telecom markets, cloud customers, and eventually humanity itself that the future is upstairs.
That’s a cleaner pitch.
It also helps that Tesla’s market story depends heavily on future breakthroughs: full self-driving, robotaxis, Optimus, energy scale, and the long-awaited day when a Model Y can drive itself across Chicago without making a theological decision at a six-way intersection.
SpaceX’s story also depends on future breakthroughs, of course—but they involve phrases like “Mars transport architecture,” “orbital manufacturing,” and “planetary-scale communications network,” which sound more expensive and therefore more investable.
Finance, after all, is not about what something is worth today. It is about how confidently you can describe what it might be worth in a future where all objections have been vaporized by a reusable booster.
In that sense, SpaceX has achieved the perfect modern valuation profile: massive current revenue potential, enormous strategic leverage, government importance, network effects, artificial intelligence adjacency, defense relevance, broadband subscriptions, launch dominance, and just enough Mars sprinkled on top to make spreadsheets behave irresponsibly.
Tesla asked investors to imagine a future where cars drive themselves.
SpaceX asked investors to imagine a future where Earth becomes the starter planet.
And frankly, one of those sounds like it deserves a higher multiple.
Editor’s note: Depending on where SpaceX trades Friday, Elon Musk could end the day somewhere between “regular unimaginably rich” and “first trillionaire in human history.” Bloomberg math had him around $988 billion at the expected IPO price, meaning he may only need the market to cough up another $12 billion—roughly one Steven Spielberg—to unlock the next absurd wealth achievement.
Basis: SpaceX is expected to debut Friday around a $1.75–$1.78 trillion valuation, and Bloomberg’s calculation put Musk near $988 billion at the $135 IPO price.