There’s been a lot of handwringing over SpaceX’s valuation lately, with some actually pretty well researched pieces (Morningstar) coming in 50% below the IPO price. The reason this was low is that they valued the company strictly through fundamental and financial metrics (which is fine) but didn’t apply any premium multiplier on top. Valuing $TSLA through that same strict lens over the years would never have come close to matching its actual market value. Call it the innovator’s premium or Elon premium — we could never quite quantify it in isolation before. Now we can use $TSLA as a baseline to value SpaceX.
Profitability, growth, and TAM are the core variables for valuation. Because so much of the expected profit sits far in the future, we can proxy with revenue and margins instead.
$TSLA’s ~15x sales multiple is a product of:
• 20% gross margins (profitability)
• High expected future growth, though stagnant in recent years (growth)
• Wide optionality in autonomy and robotics (TAM)
How much of that 15x is the Elon premium is difficult to quantify, but it’s embedded in the number. We can use it as a direct basis for SpaceX — there’s no reason the same premium wouldn’t apply.
SpaceX 2025 gross margins:
• Overall: 49%
• Launch segment: 67%
• Connectivity segment: 48%
• AI segment: 33%
Both launch and connectivity margins will rise substantially with Starship, but we’re not factoring that in (just as $TSLA’s margin profile will evolve with robotaxi). AI segment is dragged down by X advertising margins. As AI and infrastructure grow to become a bigger portion of the segment, margins improve. Q1 2026 margins already rose to 44%.
The data center opportunity:
$26B per year in contracted data center revenue from Anthropic and Google already represents over 50% of total revenue going forward. Using $CRWV and $NBIS as baselines for industry-standard margins points to ~70% gross margin.
The $26B is currently surge pricing well above standard rates. I’m assuming it normalizes to 70% GM in the future. Some will push back that these are short-term contracts. They are — but these are real assets in short supply right now. If supply normalizes, surge rates will come down, yet the capacity remains highly valuable. And the main reason the contracts are short-term is that if Grok or Cursor really scales, SpaceX will need the compute for itself and can generate even higher margins than selling it as a neocloud.
Blending the new data center margins with 2025 margins gets us to total gross margins for SpaceX of around 60% — that’s 3x $TSLA’s 20%.
Based on the profitability variable alone (holding the Elon premium constant), SpaceX should be valued at 3x $TSLA’s sales multiple, or 45x sales.
Conservative revenue run-rate:
• $18B 2025 revenue
• $5B Starlink growth in 2026
• $4B Cursor run-rate
• $26B data center run-rate
= $53B run-rate revenue (assuming zero growth in Grok)
$53B × 45x sales multiple = ~$2.39 trillion.
The Elon premium may be an ethereal concept we can’t fully quantify, but using $TSLA’s well-established valuation over the years as a framework lets us guesstimate how the market should treat SpaceX based on its margin profile alone. The other variables (growth and TAM) are up to your own projections. I’d argue SpaceX wins on both, but to keep it simple let’s call it a tie.
That said, there’s something bigger here: being the modern-day equivalent of the South Sea Company or East India Trading Company, what extra premium should a near-monopoly over the emerging space economy command?
Wenn $DIS Cars 4 mit dem $TSLA Cybercab macht:
→ Größter Animationsfilm 2027
→ Beste Tesla-Werbung ever
→ Eine Generation wächst mit autonomem Fahren auf
Ich würde mir den Film ansehen.
Und $TSLA nachkaufen 😄
Realistisch oder Wunschtraum?
Tesla FSD is the ultimate long road trip machine! 🚘 1,400 miles in 28hrs non stop, except for a short 4hr nap at a supercharger. Left at 8pm CST Thursday night and arrived Friday midnight CST to Indianapolis.
Two more unsupervised Tesla Robotaxi rides this morning. Both flawless, pickup and drop off from Tesla St. Elmo Rd location. Plus they retrieved my sunglasses from my first unsupervised ride on April 6th.
Two more unsupervised Tesla Robotaxi rides this morning. Super smooth and safe! Let me out in a parking lot instead of on a busy road. Tesla is solving for passenger experience, cost and safety 😀
Elon Musk is not a Trillionaire...he is merely a Billionaire employing about 140,000 people, providing jobs in one way or another to about 350,000 people, and enriching 100,000s of stock holders...and paying the highest taxes ever paid by any single American (and possibly any single person on earth.) If he becomes a trillionaire over the next decade, can you imagine how many people he will employ and enrich, and can you imagine how much tax he will pay? He will undoubtebly significantly move the needle on the US GDP (he has already!) How much, "Senator" Gutierrez have you contributed to the US GDP? How many 100s of thousand people do you employ? How many billions of dollars of taxes have you paid?