ARK Invest founder and Chief Executive Cathie Wood took to X this week to argue that SpaceX's $1.75 trillion IPO amounts to a “deep value opportunity,” based on what she sees as the vast untapped revenue potential of the company's Starship launch program.

At the center of her thesis is Starship, SpaceX's next-generation fully reusable rocket, which the company has positioned as central to both satellite deployment and long-range passenger transport. The framing is striking because it casts a $1.75 trillion company as a bargain, and because the revenue model behind the call depends on a rocket that has yet to complete a single orbital flight.

Space Exploration Technologies Corp., which trades under the ticker SPCX, priced its June IPO at $135 per share, opened its first trading day at $150, and climbed to a high of $225.64. The stock later slid below its offering price to a low of around $104.83 before recovering, and now trades in the roughly $142–$152 range. In after-hours trading Tuesday, SPCX was down 0.58% at $142.66.

The Math Behind the Call

Wood's argument rests on calculations from ARK Invest researcher Sam Korus, who estimates that Starlink, SpaceX's satellite internet business, earns roughly $19 million per year for every terabit per second of network capacity. His model prices the network to the data capacity each launch adds: a single Starship flight can deploy up to 60 next-generation V3 satellites, adding around 61 terabits per second of bandwidth. That works out to roughly $1 billion in recurring annual revenue per launch.

Wood then multiplied that figure by Musk's stated goal of 10,000 Starship flights per year, arriving at $10 trillion in potential annual revenue by 2030. Elon Musk replied directly to her post with three words: “It's not impossible.”

Key Assumptions Behind the Numbers

The $10 trillion projection comes with caveats. Korus himself noted that revenue per terabit per second is likely to decline as capacity expands, and ARK's own data supports that view: Starlink revenue per terabit per second has already fallen from $23 million in 2024 to $19 million in 2025.

Wood's projection also assumes that all 10,000 annual flights would deploy Starlink hardware. Musk has separately pitched the same flight cadence for point-to-point passenger transport, meaning not every launch would necessarily add network capacity. Reaching 10,000 flights per year would also require more than 27 successful launches every day. Starship, by comparison, has completed just two flights since SpaceX went public in June, and both were suborbital.

What's Actually Coming Next

SpaceX is targeting Starship Flight 14 for September 22, pending regulatory approval. According to CFO Bret Johnsen, the mission would mark Starship's first orbital flight and its first “revenue-generating flight,” as it would carry production V3 satellites. The mission also represents the first time the per-launch economics in Wood's model would apply in practice, since the $1 billion estimate is tied to the bandwidth that deployed V3 satellites add to the network.

Musk confirmed this week that deployment of the V3 constellation begins this month. He says V3 will eventually deliver more than 100 times the bandwidth of the current Starlink network of roughly 11,000 satellites.

For context, SpaceX generated $18.67 billion in total revenue in 2025. Musk himself said in June that the company “might be able to reach approximately $1T revenue in 2030” — a figure well below Wood's $10 trillion projection. Measured against 2025 revenue, Wood's projection implies more than 500-fold growth, while even Musk's own target implies roughly 50-fold growth.

Wall Street currently holds a Moderate Buy consensus on SPCX, with 26 Buy ratings, 6 Holds, and 2 Sells. The average price target stands at $232.07, implying roughly 62% upside from current levels.

This article was originally published by CoinCentral.