The pending SpaceX IPO is generating lots of buzz by introducing the most valuable enterprise ever to go from privately-held to publicly-traded at an expected market cap of $1.75 trillion. Clearly, that gigantic number signals investors’ confidence in the future growth and profitability of AI. But it also sets the bar for what SpaceX must achieve going forward to reward the folks and funds who bought the pre-offering shares in the underwriting, and will rush to load up when the opening bell rings at the Nasdaq at its debut, slated for mid-June.
As this writer has previously noted, one of America’s top valuation experts has put precise numbers on the benchmarks SpaceX needs to hit if investors are going to pocket anything like the gains you’d want for betting on this ultra-risky stock. David Trainer, CEO of research firm New Constructs calculated these bogeys for both revenues and profits ten years hence. It’s no secret that investors are willing to pay big based not on SpaceX’s current size and profitability, but its prospects for stupendous future growth. Indeed, SpaceX’s S-1 filing famously revealed that it lost $4.9 billion in 2025 on puny revenues of $18.7 billion.
Trainer’s model uses discounted cash flow projections to pinpoint the results SpaceX must show to justify an expected $1.75 trillion valuation. By Fortune‘s estimates, he’s positing that investors will want a total annual return of around 10% over the next decade to deem SpaceX a decent buy. That number, by the way, is extremely modest given that we’re talking an investment that the pure math judges as the longest of long shots.
By Trainer’s projections, the revenue target that would score by 2035 is the first such number ever followed by a “t,” $1.1 trillion.
That’s a stunner, especially when you consider that over the past four quarters, the highest sales posted by any U.S. company was the $742 billion recorded by Amazon. It’s also instructive to examine the extreme steepness of the growth trajectory required to lift SpaceX’s revenues today of $18.7 billion to $1.1 trillion. Garnering that almost 600x increase means hiking sales 50% a year, on average, for a decade. Here’s the haymaker: In this scenario, SpaceX’s revenues would jump from year-end 2034 to the close of 2035 from $718 billion to $1.1 trillion, maintaining the 50% annual pace needed to ring the bell, for an increase of $360 billion.
What’s the precedent for such a vertiginous ramp in just 12 months? It doesn’t exist. From 2024 to 2025, Nvidia, the fastest grower, added $85 billion in sales, one-fourth the clincher for SpaceX in the final year of Trainer’s timeline. The SpaceX “goal” of a $360 billion jump from 2035 to 2035 matches the total increase at Amazon covering the past six years.
Getting to $1.1 trillion would make SpaceX a pillar of the U.S. economy equal to over half the size of whole major industries harboring dozens of Fortune 500 members. In 2035, the CBO forecasts U.S. GDP at $46.7 trillion. So a decade hence, Elon Musk’s creation, at $1.1 trillion in revenue, would equal 2.4% of national income ($1.1 trillion divided by $46.7 trillion). That’s 50% bigger than the entire utilities sector, 55% of the entertainment industry, and nearly three-quarters of the U.S. transportation complex, a field that encompasses airlines, railroads, trucking, car rentals, and freight and logistics, and includes such giants as Delta Air Lines, CSX, and FedEx.
That’s an economic footprint no company has come close to making. The S-1 points to a moonshot total addressable AI market of nearly $30 trillion. As Trainer notes, big TAMs enable big growth, but also attract big competition. Alphabet, Microsoft, Nvidia, OpenAI and the sundry other rivals for the AI spoils can’t all grab a couple of points of GDP in sales, the prize built into SpaceX’s celestial cap. More likely, they’ll battle each other and SpaceX to chop a booming market into far smaller pieces. And reaching anything less than a never-before-witnessed share of our nation’s output will prove a big downer for Musk’s true believers. Those faithful are making SpaceX not just the largest and most widely-lauded IPO ever, but sadly, far-and-away the most expensive.
