SpaceX Has Fallen Over 50%. The Real Test Comes Beyond August 4

SpaceX (SPCX) priced its IPO at $135 on June 11 and generated significant excitement as it began trading on June 12. The company raised roughly $75 billion in the largest listing on record. The stock closed its first session near $161 and surged to over $225 in less than a week. However, the excitement quickly faded away, and the stock now trades at over half that peak, sitting around its lowest price since going public. 

The fall has a simple explanation. SpaceX floated only a small portion of its shares at listing. Restrictions on selling will slowly lift during the next 180 days, putting more stock on the market. As the supply goes up, the price can come down due to selling pressure. Even though the stock was added to the Nasdaq 100 and analysts remain bullish, investors are worried about the huge amount of stock that could hit the market soon.

Why SpaceX’s Launch Economics Don’t Work Like Anyone Else’s

Rocket companies all face the same problem. Building the capacity to launch costs a fortune, and none of it earns anything until a customer books a flight. The costs keep running whether a rocket goes up or not. 

SpaceX solved this by becoming its own biggest customer. Most of its launches carry its own Starlink satellites, so its rockets fly on a schedule the company sets itself. For a rival, selling launches is the whole business. For SpaceX, it is extra money on top of a system Starlink already funds. 

Morgan Stanley’s Adam Jonas built his $300 target around this. He points to how much of the chain SpaceX owns, from the parts it manufactures to the services it sells. The analyst argues that cheaper launches open the door to entirely new businesses. Jonas also credits the speed at which SpaceX moves, pointing to how quickly it has pushed into areas like large-scale computing. 

Starlink Turned a Profit Before the Rockets Had To

Starlink generated $11.4 billion in revenue during 2025 and $4.4 billion in operating profit, a margin near 39%, with a 63% adjusted EBITDA margin. As of March 31, 2026, it served around 10.3 million subscribers across 164 countries and markets. 

Those numbers compound on themselves. Each new satellite widens coverage for subscribers already paying. Each new subscriber improves the return on satellites already in orbit. Anyone building a rival network has to pay someone to launch it. SpaceX owns the rockets. The company as a whole is not consistently profitable yet, but Starlink is. It is the one part of SpaceX already generating cash rather than promising to. 

Is the stock too expensive at 38x sales?

The forward GAAP P/E is not meaningful, since SpaceX is not consistently profitable yet. The forward Price-to-sales ratio of 38.63x is the number to work with, and it is quite high. What justifies it is the earnings outlook. Wall Street analysts expect extraordinary growth of 363% in 2027 followed by 420% in 2028. It can be argued that this percentage increase is coming off a small base, but the company is increasing earnings nonetheless. 

The balance sheet is not much of a concern either. The company holds $23.68 billion in cash against $30.60 billion in debt. The resulting net debt of $6.9 billion seems manageable for a company with a $1.52 trillion market cap. Regardless, this is not a stock priced on what SpaceX earns now. It is priced on what analysts expect it to earn over the next few years

Amazon’s Project Kuiper is scaling, and Starlink’s push into lower-income markets could pull revenue per subscriber down as volumes rise. Starship carries the widest range of outcomes in the story, and at 38x sales, a delay of several years is expensive. Lock-up expirations also have further to run, and that supply can keep weighing on the price no matter what the operations do. 

What Happens on August 4

SpaceX reports its first results as a public company on August 4. Everything the stock has done so far has been based on estimates, because the company has never reported a quarter to the market. That changes now. Investors will see subscriber growth, how many rockets flew, and what the business actually earned. 

The share price has moved nearly 50% since June without a single earnings report behind it. The selling was driven by shares coming to market, not by anything the company did. Starlink is already profitable, and the launch business is built around demand SpaceX controls itself. August 4 is when numbers get a chance to say the same thing.