Morningstar’s piece says SpaceX looks overpriced even under generous assumptions. Its valuation model gives substantial credit to two big leaps that have not been proven at scale: a rapidly reusable Starship that can fly multiple times a week, and orbital data centers that would turn SpaceX from a launch and connectivity company into a major AI infrastructure player. The comments did not spend much time defending Morningstar’s exact numbers. They mostly landed on a simpler point: this IPO is not going to trade on traditional valuation discipline in the first place.
The strongest consensus was that buying SpaceX means buying Elon Musk with almost no governance checks. Commenters focused on the prospectus language giving Musk overwhelming voting control, plus restrictions on shareholder lawsuits and class actions. That made many readers treat the stock as a one-man vehicle disguised as a public company. Several pointed out that this is different in tone from founder-control setups like Alphabet or Meta because Musk runs a web of adjacent companies and has already moved resources, debt, contracts, and strategic priorities across them. In that framing, the main risk is not just bad execution. It is that minority shareholders have little recourse if SpaceX gets used to support some other Musk priority.
The other major center of gravity was the orbital data center thesis. Engineers in the comments tore into it from first principles. Cooling in vacuum is hard, maintenance is hard, radiation is real, and the economics looked backward to them. Even people willing to grant that SpaceX could technically put compute in orbit doubted there is a compelling customer case when terrestrial compute is cheaper, easier to service, and can be built in many places outside the most constrained US markets. A few readers gave the idea its strongest charitable reading: it could be a hedge against grid bottlenecks, local permitting fights, or even military demand for harder-to-attack infrastructure. Even then, the conclusion was usually that this supports a niche use case, not the trillion-dollar AI story implied by the IPO.
A separate but repeated point was that none of this may matter near term. Tesla was the template people kept returning to. The market has shown it will pay for Musk optionality, charisma, and future-storytelling even when fundamentals look stretched. Some commenters said that is exactly the trade here. Others added that passive funds and index mechanics could force additional buying once SpaceX enters major benchmarks, pulling retirement money into the stock regardless of whether ordinary investors would choose these terms. That is why the mood was less “this will fail” than “this can still work as a stock even if the business case is shaky.”
The overall takeaway was blunt. SpaceX is widely respected as the dominant launch company and
Starlink is a real business, but the IPO case being sold to public investors rests on governance terms that heavily favor Musk and growth narratives that many technically literate readers considered implausible or at least wildly premature. Anyone buying is making a conscious bet that Musk can keep bending markets, politics, and public imagination in his favor longer than the fundamentals need to catch up.
morningstar.com
Aswath Damodaran on SpaceX valuation