The most expensive stock in the S&P 500 trades at 47x revenue. SpaceX wants to go public at 70x.
By Vlad from Bastion on
That is the headline number behind the reported $1.75 trillion IPO valuation: roughly 70x forward revenue, nearly 50% above the single richest multiple in the entire index. The current record holder is Palantir, at about 47x.
Normally a premium like that is a bet on growth. Here the growth runs the other way. Palantir's revenue is projected to grow around 47% per year over the next three years. SpaceX is closer to 15%, almost three times slower.
So the proposition on the table is this: pay 1.5x the priciest multiple in America, for a business expected to grow at a third of the rate.
Betting against Elon Musk on engineering has been a losing game for two decades. The entry price is a different question. At 70x forward revenue, a large part of the next decade is already priced in.