Elon Musk wants to take SpaceX public — and he believes investors value the rocket and AI company at about $1.75 trillion.

On Wall Street, not everyone is convinced.

What does that number really mean? SpaceX had sales of $18.5 billion last year. Musk is asking investors for about 100 times the company’s value.

To put it another way: Apple, even one of the most valuable companies on Earth, is worth about 11 times its annual revenue as measured by market capitalization. Nvidia, the darling of the AI ​​revolution, is worth 25 times the price.

The upcoming IPO — short for initial public offering, when a private company sells shares to the public for the first time — could be the largest in history.

Ahead of an expected Wall Street liftoff in mid-June, SpaceX supporters say the company is not just a rocket business, but a gatekeeper to space itself.

“SpaceX controls the rails and controls access to orbit,” said Chad Anderson, CEO of Space Capital, an investment firm that already owns a stake in SpaceX.

He argues that we are only at the beginning of a decades-long space infrastructure boom worth hundreds of billions of dollars, from replacing aging satellites to building data centers in orbit.

The company’s satellite internet service, Starlink, is already generating most of SpaceX’s revenue and profits.

“If they can become a low-cost provider of Internet access to many people around the world, that could be a huge source of revenue and profit,” said Jay Ritter, an IPO expert at the University of Florida.

And Musk has made it clear that he’s thinking much bigger than quarterly profits — out-of-this-world big.

“I need to make sure SpaceX focuses on making life multiplanetary and expanding consciousness to the stars,” he wrote on X in March.

“If SpaceX succeeds in this absurdly difficult goal, it will be worth several orders of magnitude more than Earth’s economy.”

Amazing or overpriced?

Not so fast, say skeptics.

When SpaceX absorbed xAI — Musk’s artificial intelligence company and owner of social network X — in February, eyebrows on Wall Street were raised.

Eric Jonsa of Dutch Asset Corporation pointed out a broader problem: “AI startups with little or no revenue get sky-high valuations.”

“Is this an amazing company or is it ridiculously overvalued? The answer is yes,” said Scott Galloway, a marketing professor at NYU Stern.

Geoff Robinson, a financial analyst, was more forthright: “If I read one more ‘expert’ take on the SpaceX IPO that defies the laws of financial physics, I’m going to need a real rocket to get past the nonsense. The communication around this deal needs a serious BS filter.”

Critics also raise more fundamental concerns: Profit margins in the rocket launch business are thin, Starlink’s prices may be too high to win over the mass market, and it’s still unclear whether data centers in space are even a viable idea.

Kim Forrest, chief investment officer at Bokeh Capital Partners, argues that traditional financial math doesn’t apply here.

“What people are really buying is the hope and dream of commercial space,” she said, “which is more than a dream. It’s a reality.”

But Ritter offers a note of caution.

“A lot of things have to be right for revenue and profit to grow to justify that valuation,” he said.

“And occasionally it does — but most of the time, something doesn’t work out as planned. And that’s where I worry about SpaceX.”