SpaceX lost nearly $5 billion last year. So why is it worth more than Walmart?

SpaceX's Nasdaq debut valued the company at roughly $1.8 trillion, enough to rank it above Walmart, ExxonMobil, and most of the world's largest banks by market capitalization. There's just one inconvenient detail buried in the IPO filings: SpaceX lost $4.9 billion in 2025.

Growing Fast, Losing Faster

On the surface, SpaceX's revenue growth looks impressive. The company brought in $18.7 billion in total revenue in 2025, up 33 percent from the year before, a growth rate most established companies would envy. But costs grew even faster than revenue, producing a net loss of $4.9 billion for the year. In other words, SpaceX is spending significantly more money than it makes, even as its top line expands rapidly.

Where the Money Is Going

Much of SpaceX's spending goes into capital-intensive, long-horizon bets: building and launching Starship, the massive next-generation rocket central to Musk's Mars ambitions; expanding the Starlink satellite constellation, which requires continuously manufacturing and launching new satellites to replace those that deorbit; and building out AI infrastructure and data centers, a business that is still in its early stages. These are not businesses that turn profitable overnight, they require years of sustained investment before, if ever, they generate returns proportional to the capital poured in.

What Analysts Are Saying

This is precisely why some analysts are sounding the alarm on SpaceX's valuation. Morningstar analysts have questioned whether the $1.8 trillion price tag is justified, with some estimates suggesting a fair value closer to $800 billion to $1.1 trillion, roughly half to two-thirds of what investors paid at IPO. That is not a small discrepancy. It implies that, in Morningstar's view, SpaceX's stock could be overvalued by $700 billion to $1 trillion or more.

The Stakes Are Bigger Than One Stock

Because of the scale of this IPO, the consequences of a valuation correction would not be contained to SpaceX shareholders alone. Analysts have warned that if valuations fail to hold, it raises concerns about potential losses for pension funds, individual retirement accounts, and university endowments, many of which are believed to have taken positions in the offering given its scale and profile. A trillion-dollar miss is not just a headline; it would ripple through retirement accounts and institutional portfolios far beyond Silicon Valley.

The Bull Case Investors Are Betting On

To be fair, SpaceX's defenders have a coherent argument: the company dominates global orbital launch, Starlink is profitable and growing toward tens of millions of subscribers, and the AI infrastructure business, while small today, could become significant if SpaceX's data-center ambitions materialize. Investors who bought into the IPO are effectively betting that today's $4.9 billion loss is the cost of building businesses that will generate outsized profits years from now, the same bet early Amazon and Tesla investors made during their own loss-making years.

Whether that bet pays off, or whether SpaceX becomes a cautionary tale about IPO-era valuations getting ahead of fundamentals, will now be tracked every quarter, in public, for the first time in the company's history.