With a market cap of $2 trillion, SpaceX (SPCX -2.74%) is one of the largest public companies in the world, but that hasn't stopped it from experiencing penny stock-like volatility. The shares were priced at $150 in the initial public offering (IPO), soared to an all-time high of more than $225, crashed to just under $105 before finally returning to their debut price of $150 as of the time of writing.
And the company's recent operating results are no less exciting, as new artificial intelligence (AI)-led growth drivers help dispel fears of a maturing space industrial business. Let's dig deeper into the pros and cons of SpaceX to decide if the stock still has millionaire-maker potential.
NASDAQ: SPCX
Key Data Points
A relatively late public offering
Generally, IPO investors enjoy the best returns when they get in on the ground floor of a long-term opportunity. Great examples of this include tech giants like Amazon, which sold for a split-adjusted price of just $0.075 per share when it hit the market in 1997. Each of the company's shares is worth $257 today, giving investors a life-changing return of 342,566% if they bought at the beginning and never sold.
SpaceX almost certainly does not give its investors this type of opportunity. With its starting public valuation of $1.77 trillion, the majority of the wealth it created during the past two decades has gone to its founder, Elon Musk, who single-handedly owns almost half of the equity.
This is important because the larger a company is, the harder it is to move the needle through additional growth. And with that in mind, SpaceX investors can anticipate solid returns in the best-case scenario. But it looks unlikely for the stock to deliver the extreme millionaire-maker post IPO returns of a company like Amazon because it is already so large.
Can SpaceX justify its valuation?
For SpaceX to reward long-term investors, it will need to meet and then exceed current expectations. That's because with a price-to-sales (P/S) ratio of 70, the stock trades at an immense premium over the S&P 500 average of 3.8, and this means substantial growth is already priced in.
Second-quarter earnings were encouraging. Revenue soared 92% year over year to $7.8 billion, driven by strength in the company's burgeoning AI business centered around the recently acquired assets of xAI, which was purchased earlier this year.
Image source: Getty Images.
The AI segment now represents 33% of SpaceX's total revenue. And there are signs the company can maintain its momentum through high-profile deals such as one with Alphabet to rent out computing power from its Colossus data center for $920 million per month. SpaceX recently struck a similar deal for AI hosting worth $1.11 billion per month with an unnamed customer, a sign of the seemingly insatiable demand.
SpaceX's bottom line is also improving. The second-quarter operating loss narrowed from $1.94 billion to $143 million, and the strong trend suggests sustainable profitability could be just around the corner.
Investors should remain skeptical
At this point, even the early skeptics can admit that SpaceX is an objectively impressive company. Despite being so large, it still offers extremely high growth prospects, helping to justify its sky-high valuation. That said, it still might make sense for investors to wait on the sidelines before considering a position in the stock.
While AI infrastructure demand is high now, there is no guarantee that it will remain this high forever. In fact, a Bank of America survey found that 45% of fund managers see a potential AI bubble as the biggest risk facing the market right now. And if SpaceX's customers decide they no longer want to pour billions into AI-related spending, the company's growth could slow down dramatically. This dynamic makes the stock quite risky.
