SpaceX Stock Cools Off: The $178 Reality Check That Was Always Coming
(SeaPRwire) – By: Oliver Hawthorne
The first question I heard from a portfolio manager last Tuesday was blunt: “Do they actually make money, or is this just Elon’s lottery ticket?” That question is now the entire thesis for every SPCX holder watching their premarket screen. SpaceX stock dropped another 3% Monday, sliding to $178. Two days of red — 5% Wednesday, 3.6% Thursday — sucked the oxygen out of the IPO euphoria that peaked at $185 on June 12. Let’s be precise: SPCX is still up 37% from its $135 IPO price. But if you bought on the open market after listing, your paper gains have nearly vanished. The debate is now less about Mars and more about multiple compression.
The raw facts tell you why this pullback has teeth. KeyBanc slapped a Sector Weight rating on SPCX Monday. That’s a hold in plain English. Their math is uncomfortable. 29x price-to-sales. 71x EV/EBITDA on 2027 projections. That’s a premium to every peer in space, AI, and communications services. The company burned $4.9 billion in 2025. Q1 2026 alone lost another $4.28 billion. The Street’s defense? Elon’s long-term vision. But with Musk holding 42% of the stock locked until June 2027, and only 5% of the 13 billion shares in the initial float, liquidity is dangerously thin. When the float is that tight, any sentiment shift amplifies the slide. Six analysts still have Buy ratings. CFRA is the lone Sell. That imbalance alone makes me nervous.
Let me walk through the business structure because the valuation story lives here, not in the headlines. Starlink — the Connectivity segment — delivered 61% of 2025 revenue, roughly $11.4 billion, with a 63% adjusted EBITDA margin. That’s the real profit engine. Then you have the AI segment, born from the February 2026 merger with xAI. It’s still bleeding cash. But the contract wins are enormous: $1.25 billion per month from Anthropic, $920 million per month from Google. KeyBanc projects AI revenue hitting $50.6 billion by 2027. Here’s the rub: Grok’s U.S. business adoption sits at 3.1%. Anthropic owns 41%. OpenAI holds 39.5%. The market is pricing the dream, not the current share. Starship flight 13, scheduled for June 29, is the only near-term catalyst that can reset this narrative. Starship is the key to deploying Starlink V3, cutting launch costs, and enabling orbital data centers. Until that rocket flies reliably, the “prove it phase” KeyBanc described will dominate the conversation.
The endgame here is straightforward. You cannot justify 29x sales on a company that lost nearly $5 billion last year unless you believe the AI segment closes the adoption gap at hyperscale speed. Starlink is profitable, but it’s not growing fast enough to carry the multiple alone. The AI segment is a binary bet: either Grok eats into the 41% market share held by Anthropic and OpenAI, or it remains a marginal player. Starship’s June 29 launch will be the first concrete evidence point. Fail or delay, and the multiple compression continues. Succeed, and you get a short-term pop. But sustainable value requires more than one flight test. It requires narrowing the adoption gap by ten percentage points in twelve months. That’s the bar. Not a tweet. Not a moonshot. Real enterprise market share. Until that happens, the pullback is just the market doing its job.
Author bio: Oliver Hawthorne, a Principal Correspondent permanently stationed at an international technology review, covering capital flows and structural disruptions across hardware and infrastructure sectors.