Launch, Connectivity & Compute
Reusable launch as the cost floor under everything else — Starlink today, Starship-enabled markets next, and orbital compute as the newest bet.
Personal notes published for reference. Figures are sourced from company filings, releases, and press coverage as of the date above — the interpretation is mine and may be wrong.
SpaceX priced its IPO at $135/share on June 12, 2026, opened at $150, and closed day one at $160.95 — the largest IPO on record, raising $75B at an implied valuation of roughly $1.77T (about $2.1T at the day-one close). Roughly 30% of the offering was reserved for retail. Everything below is now written against SPCX as a direct public holding rather than a fund or SPV wrapper.
The strongest operational bench of the Musk-associated names — Gwynne Shotwell running day-to-day operations alongside Musk's technical direction. Unlike Tesla, the key-person risk is buffered by a president who has run the business through two decades of execution.
Layered, and each layer is large on its own: commercial and government launch, satellite broadband, and whatever Starship's cost-per-kilogram unlocks that isn't economic today. The last category is the one that can't be sized — which is either the appeal or the problem depending on your temperament.
The first earnings report as a public company (Aug 4, 2026) beat on both lines: $7.8B Q2 revenue (+92% YoY, vs. ~$6.8B consensus) and $3.5B adjusted EBITDA (vs. $2.0B consensus), with the CFO guiding to $100B annualized recurring revenue by year-end. The catch is Q2 capex of $18.4B — enormous even by SpaceX's standards — now funding orbital compute on top of Starship and Starlink.
The best track record on this watchlist by a wide margin. Orbital-class reusability and a global satellite broadband network both went from thesis to working business inside a decade. When this company says it will do something hard, the base rate favors it.
The business that turned SpaceX from a launch provider into a consumer and enterprise connectivity company — and the reason the equity story isn't purely cyclical government contracting.
Vertical integration is the whole advantage: SpaceX builds the satellites and launches them on its own reusable rockets. No competitor gets to launch at internal cost. That structurally caps what anyone else can charge and still make money.
Beyond residential broadband — maritime, aviation, enterprise, and direct-to-cell. Each is a higher-ARPU segment than consumer, and each is a market where the incumbent alternative is expensive and bad.
Government and defense connectivity has become a meaningful line, with the strategic value of a sovereign-adjacent constellation now well understood by every defense ministry.
Subscriber growth against capacity, ARPU mix shifting toward enterprise/mobility, and how much of Starship's launch capacity gets consumed by next-gen Starlink satellites versus external customers.
The variable that makes the rest of the thesis non-linear. If full reusability at scale works, cost-per-kilogram to orbit drops enough that entire categories of business become viable.
Every space business case that doesn't close today — larger constellations, orbital manufacturing, lunar infrastructure, meaningful mass to Mars — fails on launch cost, not on physics or demand. Starship is a bet that removing that constraint creates markets rather than just serving existing ones. That's why it can't be sized with a spreadsheet, and why it's the single highest-variance input to any SpaceX valuation.
Next-generation Starlink satellites are the anchor customer — bigger, more capable satellites that Falcon can't economically loft. That gives Starship a captive internal demand source while external customers develop.
Development timelines have slipped before and will again. Rapid reflight cadence — not any single successful flight — is the milestone that actually matters, and it's the hardest one. Flight Test 14, now targeting Monday, Sept 28, 2026 (slipped from ~Sept 22), is the first attempt at an orbital flight with the new Block 3 vehicle (Booster 21 / Ship 41) — the next real data point.
The newest and most speculative leg just went from a conceptual Musk-ecosystem overlap to a named contract: using launch capacity to put AI compute in orbit, with NVIDIA as the anchor partner.
Terrestrial AI datacenters are increasingly constrained by power and cooling, not chips. Orbit offers continuous solar power and radiative cooling — and if launch cost collapses, the economics of putting racks up there stop being absurd.
SpaceX and NVIDIA are partnering on Starmind AI-1, a payload built around NVIDIA's next-generation Rubin GPUs and Vera CPUs — "datacenter-class compute" in orbit. This replaces the earlier xAI-overlap thesis with a real, disclosed customer relationship, though it's still a single payload, not a fleet.
Better than pure optionality now that NVIDIA is named, but still early — this depends on Starship economics working first, then on orbital compute being genuinely cheaper than another terrestrial datacenter, a claim still far from settled. I'd move this from near-zero toward a small, real weight in a base case.
Each update has pulled the date forward. The May 2026 IPO prospectus said orbital compute launches "as early as 2028"; the Aug 4 earnings call said "next year"; in early September Musk put the first NVIDIA-powered AI satellites at Q4 2027 with "significant scale" in 2028 — about a year ahead of what investors were told at the IPO. The new Gigasat factory is aimed at ~1 GW/year of orbital compute by late 2027, and Musk's stated "tentative target" is 20 GW of power and cooling capacity online by end of 2027. Google also booked a SpaceX launch for its Project Suncatcher orbital-AI test.
ARK — a SpaceX holder and the most aggressive public bull on this leg — has framed orbital datacenters as a ~$300B opportunity that could eventually dwarf Starlink, and Musk has publicly endorsed ARK's Brett Winton's argument that the 100th orbital gigawatt could cost a third of the first. Musk has now gone further on X, suggesting the build-out could land faster than even ARK projects. The usual Musk-timeline discount applies — but on this company, not Tesla, the base rate for "faster than the bulls expected" is better than it has any right to be.
The terrestrial side — SpaceXAI's Colossus sites in Memphis — is where the speed is visible today. In a Sept 25, 2026 post, Musk laid out Colossus 2 at 110k GB200 plus 440k GB300 chips, with another 220k GB300 coming online the following week, another 220k in November, and possibly another 220k by late December "if we get lucky." That would more than double the NVIDIA chip count by year-end and hit the old 1M-GPU target ahead of schedule, backed by a 1.2 GW permanent power plant replacing temporary generation. Caveat: satellite imagery earlier in the year showed Colossus 2's cooling capacity well behind the headline claims, so I'd count chips when they're drawing power, not when they're announced.
The furthest-out leg, and the one where TAM is least meaningful as a concept.
Starship's selection as a crewed lunar lander is a real, contracted government program — the concrete piece of this. It's revenue and it's a forcing function for Starship development.
Building on the Moon — permanent infrastructure, in-situ resource use, a fuel depot supporting deeper missions — is a decades-long proposition with no revenue model I'd underwrite today. It belongs in a thesis as a statement about ambition and talent retention, not as value.
I own this for Starlink cash flows and Starship optionality. The lunar and Mars ambitions are why the best engineers work there, which indirectly protects the first two. I don't pay for them.
This is the first quarter of public 13F data SpaceX has ever had — not a trend yet, but a useful snapshot of who showed up on day one and how much of the float rolled in from pre-IPO strategic holders versus fresh institutional buying.
There's no prior quarter to sell out of — every institutional position is new by definition. The number worth watching is next quarter's, once there's an actual base to compare against.
NVIDIA's stake predates the IPO as a strategic investor and simply converted into public shares. Atreides Management disclosed SpaceX as its single largest position at roughly $4.7B. Alphabet and Harvard Management also reported large stakes, though the disclosed dollar values vary meaningfully across data providers this early — treat any specific figure beyond NVIDIA and Atreides as directional until filings settle.
Whether the lockup expiration produces net institutional selling once shares are freely tradable, and whether the initial strategic/insider-adjacent holders (NVIDIA, Musk himself) are still counted alongside genuinely new institutional buyers in next quarter's filings.
The first quarter as a public company delivered a real beat and a near-14% single-day drop to an all-time low in the same month — that tension is the whole case right now.
If this plays out: ~$110
Revenue and EBITDA beat handily on the first public print, and the stock still fell almost 14% in a session to an all-time low near $108 — the market repricing SpaceX as a capital-intensive AI/infrastructure spender, not a pure launch-and-broadband compounder. $18.4B of Q2 capex is enormous even by this company's standards, and it's now funding a third speculative bet (orbital compute) on top of two that haven't fully proven out. Flight Test 14 — the first orbital Block 3 attempt — is imminent, and Starship has a real history of slipped timelines and failed flights at exactly this stage of a new vehicle.
If this plays out: ~$180
SpaceX beat revenue and EBITDA by a wide margin on its first quarter public, and absorbed a 900M+-share lockup unlock in early August without a selloff — the stock actually rose 6% on that unlock, early evidence the supply-overhang fear is more theoretical than real so far. Starlink and launch remain the reason to own this. NVIDIA's Starmind AI-1 deal and Flight Test 14 are the next two data points, not verdicts. Expect a stock that trades on capex disclosures and Starship outcomes rather than settling into a range this early in its public life.
If this plays out: ~$300
Morgan Stanley's framing is the cleanest version: at today's price, the market largely pays for Starlink and launch, while the orbital-compute bet — now anchored by a named NVIDIA partnership on next-gen Rubin/Vera silicon — is priced at close to nothing. If Flight Test 14 succeeds and reflight cadence follows, the cost-per-kilogram unlock that makes orbital datacenters, lunar infrastructure, and bigger constellations real all move from thesis to roadmap together. A management team with the best execution record on this watchlist, already guided to $100B ARR by year-end, is the setup behind Morgan Stanley's $300 target.
$148.68 at the Sept 25, 2026 close, well off both the $160.95 day-one close and the 52-week high, against a Buy consensus averaging roughly $222–239 depending on the tracker (Morgan Stanley Overweight at $300). The first quarter as a public company was defined more by capex sticker shock than by the underlying beat. The scenario targets above are my own rough, directional estimates — not formal price targets — anchored to the sell-side range rather than a full model.
Musk's attention is split across SpaceX, Tesla, xAI, and more. Shotwell mitigates this operationally but not strategically.
$18.4B of quarterly capex and climbing, now funding orbital compute on top of Starship and constellation replenishment. Starlink and launch cash generation has to keep pace.
Launch licensing, spectrum allocation, and orbital debris rules are all policy-dependent. Competing constellations and national programs are funded and motivated.
Day-one close valued the company near $2.1T; the stock has since round-tripped to an all-time low near $108 and back to roughly $150. A further lockup unlocked ~319M shares around Sept 9, 2026 (the 90-trading-day mark) — the market absorbed the first one without much damage, but each event is a live supply test on a name that's already shown it can move 14% in a session.