Can I Buy SpaceX Stock? How Much Is It Worth Today?

• As of 2021, SpaceX has over 160 million outstanding shares, priced at $419.99 per share. 
• The latest round of funding sent SpaceX’s valuation to $74 billion.
• Since it’s a private corporation, you can’t buy shares from the stock market. 

SpaceX has become one of the most valuable private companies in the world. It has grown by competing with incumbents head-on, instead of disrupting industries through the use of technology and marketing techniques.

Since the company is growing at an impressive rate, many investors want a piece of SpaceX. But can you directly buy SpaceX stock?

The answer is NO.

SpaceX is a private company and isn’t listed on any American Stock Exchange. Thus, you can’t buy shares from the stock market.

However, there are many shareholders of SpaceX, just not retail investors. Most of them are investment firms that invest in private corporations, and some are wealthy individuals, like Elon Musk (CEO) himself.

Who Owns SpaceX?

Elon Musk’s trust holds 54% of the outstanding shares of SpaceX and has 78% voting control of the outstanding stock.

No other investor owns more than 10% of SpaceX. Google parent Alphabet has a 7.5% stake in the company. Other major shareholders include Valor Equity Partners, Founders Fund, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, and Capricorn.

Musk Has No Plan For Filing IPO

Actually, Elon Musk has several plans, but filling an IPO is not one of them. He wants to reduce the cost of rocket launches by a factor of ten, continue commercial satellite launches and US government missions, build a global satellite internet service called Starlink, and eventually put humans on Mars.

SpaceX needs money to develop the technologies required to implements these projects. To get that money, the company has raised equity financing and debt multiple times.

According to CNBC, SpaceX raised more than $1 billion in financing in the year 2019 alone. The funds will help SpaceX get Starlink to an operational level, which, once complete, would consist of over 11,000 satellites flying in low Earth orbit. This network will generate revenue that can be further used to build more advanced spaceships and rockets.

The Series K funding brought in $536 million, raising the value of SpaceX to $33.3 billion. In 2019, SpaceX had roughly 160 million outstanding shares, priced at $204 per share.

Graph of SpaceX valuation vs. funding rounds | Credit: Forge Global

The company’s valuation has increased steadily as it has raised fundings to develop advanced rockets and spacecraft over the past decade. SpaceX has been able to draw money from private investors with ease.

In fact, both equity raises in 2019 were oversubscribed: the company raised $100 million more than they were looking for. In its April 2019 recent round of funding, investor demand was so high that SpaceX reportedly could have raised an additional $400 million.

Update

In February 2021, SpaceX completed an equity funding round of $850 million, which sent its valuation to $74 billion. The company raised new funds at $419.99 a share.

This represents a 60% jump in SpaceX’s valuation from its previous funding round in August 2020, when the company raised $2 billion at a $46 billion valuation.

SpaceX Revenue

In 2018, SpaceX revenue stood at $2.2 billion (a 69% increase than previous year). It had an EBITDA (short for earnings before interest, tax, depreciation, and amortization) margin of 10.8%.

SpaceX revenue graph from 2013 to 2018

This figure is surprisingly close to the 13.5% and 13% EBITDA margin earned by Lockheed Martin and Boeing, despite the fact that SpaceX rocket launch costs much, much less than its rivals.

The company has been working to further reduce the launch cost by making rockets fully reusable, just like airplanes. If successful, the cost of access to space will be reduced by up to 100 times.

Furthermore, Musk believes that Starlink could generate more than ten times the revenue that SpaceX’s business of launching rockets could. If everything goes according to the plan, revenue from Starlink could be more than NASA’s annual budget.

“Total internet connectivity revenue in the world is about $1 trillion and we think maybe we can access about 3%” with Starlink. – Elon Musk

There Is One Way To Invest In SpaceX

You can indirectly invest in SpaceX by investing in its part-owner Alphabet. The company, along with Fidelity, invested $1 billion into SpaceX for 10% ownership of the private space agency.

Unreleased image from 2010 | Credit: SpaceX

Therefore, in theory, owning shares of Alphabet is a way to indirectly grab a piece of the extraterritorial action. It might be a smart financial move if you buy shares at a fair price.

In 2018, Google’s revenue amounted to $136.22 billion, and it had $48 billion of net operating cash flow. Its gross profit for the twelve months ending March 2019, was $80 billion, a 17.5% increase year-over-year.

Read: What Hardware/Software Does SpaceX Use To Power Its Rockets?

Of course, buying Alphabet stock is the added bonus of owning a bit of its suite of products, including Google, Android, YouTube, and its self-driving car projects.

Currently, it is the only way you can invest in SpaceX. But before you put your hard-earned money into the stock market, be sure to diversify your portfolio at the lowest risk possible.