Key Points
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SpaceX went public June 12 at $135 per share, raising $75 billion in the largest initial public offering on record.
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The company lost $4.9 billion in 2025 and another $4.3 billion in the first quarter of 2026 alone.
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Starlink is highly profitable — it’s everything else that’s burning cash.
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SpaceX (NASDAQ: SPCX) went public on June 12 at $135 per share, raising $75 billion in the largest initial public offering (IPO) in history. Three weeks later, the rocket, satellite-internet, and artificial intelligence (AI) company commands a market capitalization of about $2.1 trillion. Only a handful of companies have ever been worth that much — and every one of them earned billions in profits when it got there.
SpaceX is different. Across 2025 and the first quarter of 2026, its reported losses add up to a trailing net loss of about $9.4 billion, set against roughly $19.3 billion in trailing revenue.
That combination raises a question worth answering before the company joins the Nasdaq-100 on July 7 — an event that will make index funds automatic buyers of the stock. Has a money-losing business ever been valued this highly? And if it hasn’t, should investors care?
A price arguably without precedent
Start with the historical check. The market has valued unprofitable companies richly before, but the previous standard-bearers operated on a different scale entirely. Rivian, the electric-truck maker, briefly commanded a market value of about $150 billion in late 2021 while deeply unprofitable — and that stood out as extreme at the time. Uber ran years of losses with a valuation that topped out around $100 billion. Amazon, the dot-com era’s favorite money-loser, was worth only tens of billions back when it was losing money.
SpaceX’s $2.1 trillion is roughly 14 times the Rivian benchmark. I can’t find a money-losing company in market history that has come anywhere close. So it’s safe to say that SpaceX appears to be the most valuable unprofitable company the market has ever seen.
Now, the loss itself deserves a closer look, because it isn’t the loss of a struggling business. According to the company’s IPO prospectus, SpaceX — whose filings also include xAI, the AI business it absorbed — generated $18.7 billion of revenue in 2025, up 33% year over year, and lost $4.9 billion. Then it lost another $4.28 billion in the first quarter of 2026.
But the composition matters. Starlink, the satellite-internet business, produced $11.4 billion of 2025 revenue — about 61% of the total — and generated $4.4 billion in operating profit. The losses come from everything surrounding it: about $3 billion a year of research and development spending on the Starship rocket program, plus the enormous computing costs of the AI operation. In plain terms, one highly profitable business is funding two gigantic bets.
What a $2.1 trillion price tag demands
What makes the record more than trivia is what it implies about expectations. At about $2.1 trillion, SpaceX trades at more than 100 times its trailing revenue — not its earnings, its revenue. A price like that requires nearly everything to go right: Starlink must keep compounding for years, Starship must eventually turn its development spending into dramatically cheaper access to space, and the AI bet must justify losses that are widening, not narrowing. The $75 billion raised in the IPO buys time, but it doesn’t change what has to happen.
Fresh evidence is coming. SpaceX hasn’t yet announced the date of its first earnings report as a public company, but that report — expected this summer — will offer the first new numbers since the prospectus, including whether Starlink’s growth and margins are holding up and how fast the Starship and AI spending is scaling.
The answer to the headline question, then, is yes: Investors should care — not because losses disqualify a stock, but because of the expectations this price locks in. Amazon lost money for years and became one of the great investments of all time. The difference is that Amazon’s doubters could buy it for tens of billions. SpaceX asks investors to pay a price that already assumes the bets pay off, from a company that has yet to file a single quarterly report as a publicly traded company, with fortunes still closely tied to CEO Elon Musk.
Personally, I’ll let the first few earnings reports answer the questions the prospectus can’t. Records are fascinating. That doesn’t make them buyable.
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Daniel Sparks and his clients have no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Amazon and Uber Technologies. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.
