Hope Sterling: Hey, you know what kind of week it's been? The kind where I keep refreshing a stock price even though I don't own the stock and cannot explain why I feel personally invested.
Michael C. Vincent: SPCX.
Hope Sterling: Obviously SPCX. Okay so — no wait, I'm starting with the number because the number is the only place to start. Morningstar put a $63 fair value on this stock. The IPO price was $135. It's now trading around $170 after the correction. That's 169% overvalued by their math, and that is not some fringe blog, that's Morningstar.
Michael C. Vincent: And the IPO itself — let's name the scale, because I think it gets lost. SpaceX raised somewhere between $75 and $86 billion on June 12th, listed on Nasdaq under SPCX. Saudi Aramco's IPO in 2019 raised $26.6 billion and that was considered almost incomprehensible. This is three times that.
Hope Sterling: Three times — wait, three times the previous record?
Michael C. Vincent: Three times the previous record. In four days the stock ran to $225.64 — an all-time high — then pulled back to the $160 to $170 range. People called that a correction. Morningstar would call it still catastrophically overpriced.
Hope Sterling: And the retail buyers who were rushing in during that run-up — some of them literally said, out loud, that the valuation was stupid. And bought it. That's the thing I — I don't know whether to be horrified or kind of in awe of that? Like, what even is that move?
Michael C. Vincent: That's the question, isn't it. Whether that's delusion, or whether it's a genuinely new kind of market reasoning.
Hope Sterling: But wait — I keep getting stuck on something. People are saying 'overvalued' like that's the news, but analysts get overvalued calls wrong on tech all the time, right? Like, wasn't Amazon 'overvalued' for a decade?
Michael C. Vincent: That's the thing — that's exactly the thing people reach for, and I want to be precise here. The point isn't that Morningstar is right. The point is that $170 sits above even Morningstar's most optimistic scenario. Not their base case. Their moonshot.
Hope Sterling: The moonshot is $154?
Michael C. Vincent: One hundred and fifty-four dollars. And that scenario requires a rapidly reusable Starship — multiple launches per week — plus commercialized space-based data centers. Neither of which Morningstar expects before 2028. That is the ceiling of credible optimism. The market blew past it.
Hope Sterling: Okay that's — I mean that actually gave me chills a little. Because it's not like the market is just being optimistic. It's being more optimistic than the most optimistic analyst. That's a different thing.
Michael C. Vincent: Here's the plain version. Imagine a house appraiser — the most bullish appraiser in the room — says the absolute best-case price for this house, if everything goes perfectly, is $154,000. You just paid $170,000. You're not being optimistic. You're above optimism. That's where SPCX is trading.
Hope Sterling: And Aswath Damodaran — like, the Dean of Valuation — he went on CNBC and said even his bull case barely gets you to $1.3 trillion. The IPO valued SpaceX at $1.8 trillion. So even the bulls are — they're not in the building.
Michael C. Vincent: Keith Snyder at CFRA Research went public with the same skepticism. So this isn't one stray voice. The analyst community — across different firms, different methodologies — they're all arriving at roughly: the market has priced in outcomes that no credible model supports yet.
Hope Sterling: Which means the debate isn't really 'overvalued or not.' It's like — what are people actually pricing in, if it's not any analyst's best case? That's the weirder question.
Michael C. Vincent: That question is where the AI claim walks in. SpaceX announced a pivot into AI — $26.5 trillion addressable market, their framing — and suddenly the rocket math doesn't have to add up anymore.
Hope Sterling: Okay wait — no, because LISTEN — that's the take I keep seeing everywhere and it's driving me a little insane. 'SpaceX is an AI company now, so the old valuation models don't apply.' Like, that's a real thing people are saying?
Michael C. Vincent: That is the circulating take. And I'd be careful about how we push back on it — because the $26.5 trillion AI and data infrastructure market is not fake. That's a real, massive industry. The lie isn't the market size.
Hope Sterling: Then what's the lie?
Michael C. Vincent: Conflating the size of the room with your odds of getting in the door. SpaceX is a rocket company. Starlink is the actual revenue engine right now — satellite internet. They have not built an AI business. The engineering prerequisites for even entering that market — rapidly reusable Starship, space-based data centers — Morningstar says those aren't expected before 2028.
Hope Sterling: Actually, wait, this is the part that I think is a tell. The Guardian tracked Musk's posts on X during the IPO run-up. He posted twice as often about UK race and immigration as he did about SpaceX. During his own company's historic listing.
Michael C. Vincent: You see, that detail does real work. If the AI pivot were operational — if it were a genuine strategic reality — the CEO would be talking about it. Obsessively. Jeff Sommer at the New York Times called this whole thing an 'astonishingly speculative bet' precisely because of what Musk's attention is actually on versus what the valuation assumes.
Hope Sterling: So the $26.5 trillion claim is basically — I mean, it's not a pivot, it's a number dropped into a prospectus to make $170 a share feel like it has a floor.
Michael C. Vincent: It mirrors exactly how tech companies inflated addressable market claims for a decade to justify premium multiples. And the part that comes later — the Musk control question, what happens when the narrative engine and the governance risk are the same person — considerably darker territory.
Hope Sterling: And that's the thing that keeps short-circuiting me — because investors didn't buy in spite of Elon's control. They bought because of it. Like, that's the whole bet. One person, total control, no board that can slow him down.
Michael C. Vincent: That's new. I mean that genuinely. Every governance framework we've built since Enron says concentrated control is a risk factor. Jeff Sommer named it exactly that — a key risk. But retail investors read the same disclosure and treated it as the feature, not the bug.
Hope Sterling: The Musk tax.
Michael C. Vincent: Cuts both ways, though. Picture someone who got in at $135 on June 12th, watched SPCX hit $225.64 four days later — that's a 19.2% single-day gain at its peak momentum — and felt completely validated. That person is now holding at $170 and watching every Starship test flight like it's a medical result.
Hope Sterling: Oh that's such a real image. Because the thing to watch — I mean, Morningstar's $154 moonshot ceiling literally requires Starship reusability before 2028. Multiple launches per week. If those milestones slip—
Michael C. Vincent: Then the ceiling drops below where the stock is trading. And I want to be honest — sourcing on exactly when those milestones are expected is thin. We're working from analyst projections, not anything SpaceX has disclosed publicly. SpaceX doesn't file quarterly earnings.
Hope Sterling: Wait, they don't have to?
Michael C. Vincent: Not in the same way — and that's the canary. The Guardian detail about the UK immigration posts isn't just gossip. It's the early-warning signal. When the narrative engine is the same person as the execution risk, you watch his attention the way you used to watch earnings calls.
Hope Sterling: So the thing to actually watch isn't the stock price — it's whether Starship hits those reusability windows before 2028, and whether Musk is even in the room when it matters. That's genuinely a different kind of due diligence than anything I've heard before.
Michael C. Vincent: And yet — there's no clean answer to that. Whether it's genuinely new due diligence or just a very sophisticated story people are telling themselves to justify $170 for something Morningstar says is worth $63. I keep arriving at the same wall.
Hope Sterling: That's the thing I'm actually left holding, like — are the people who said 'this is stupid' and bought anyway making a rational meta-bet on Musk's execution track record? Or is that just the most expensive FOMO in IPO history dressed up in smart-sounding language? I genuinely don't know. And I'm not sure we're supposed to know yet.
Michael C. Vincent: No. We're not. That's the honest answer.
Hope Sterling: Which is kind of where I'll just — sit with it, I think. Uncomfortably.
Michael C. Vincent: Good company to be uncomfortable in. Thank you for thinking through it out loud with me.
