SpaceX's $1.75 trillion IPO could reprice RKLB, ASTS and LUNR

SpaceX Is About to Go Public. Here's Who Gets Rich When It Does.

In the summer of 2004, Google went public at a $23 billion valuation. The IPO was chaotic, the bankers hated the Dutch auction format, and most serious investors thought the price was absurd. Within three years, Google had a $200 billion market cap. Every internet company it touched got repriced upward.

Now replace Google with SpaceX. Replace 2004 with June 2026. And replace $23 billion with $1.75 trillion.

That's the number being floated in deal rooms right now. $1.75 trillion. For context, that's bigger than the entire GDP of Australia. It would make SpaceX the most valuable company ever to debut on a public exchange, and it would land in a market that's still finding its footing after a bruising stretch of macro uncertainty.

Here's what most people are getting wrong about this: they're treating it as a SpaceX story. It isn't. It's a repricing event for an entire category of stocks that institutional money has been ignoring because there was no liquid benchmark to anchor against.

Fund managers don't price things in a vacuum. They compare. Right now, if you want exposure to the orbital launch business, your options are thin. Rocket Lab USA (NASDAQ:RKLB) is the only other company with an operational rocket that reaches orbit. When SpaceX lists at $1.75 trillion, portfolio managers will look at RKLB's current market cap (hovering around $10 billion) and start asking uncomfortable questions about the gap. You don't need RKLB to become SpaceX to think that gap is too wide.

Then there's AST SpaceMobile (NASDAQ:ASTS), which is building satellite broadband that connects directly to regular smartphones, no special hardware required. The thesis is essentially Starlink, but without the dish. SpaceX going public at $1.75 trillion is the loudest possible validation of the satellite broadband model. ASTS is one of the few pure-play public alternatives.

And Intuitive Machines (NASDAQ:LUNR) is a direct SpaceX customer. Their lunar landers ride Falcon 9 rockets. They carry NASA contracts worth billions. When SpaceX IPOs, LUNR becomes part of the story whether it wants to or not.

Now for the honest counterargument, because smart people disagree with this whole framing. The bear case is that SpaceX at $1.75 trillion is so large it actually sucks oxygen out of the room. Institutional capital that flows into the IPO has to come from somewhere, and smaller space-adjacent names might get sold to fund the allocation. There's also the risk that SpaceX's public debut reveals unit economics that make the whole sector look more commoditised than the bulls think.

But here's what I keep coming back to: when Amazon went public, it didn't hurt Walmart's e-commerce ambitions. It created them. The sector-defining IPO usually makes the category real, not smaller.

If SpaceX files before June, the window to own the second-order plays is short. That's not a prediction. That's just the math of how re-ratings work.

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Quick Takes

Three more stories worth knowing about

Becton Dickinson's EPS Beat Is Paper-Thin

Becton, Dickinson and Company (NYSE:BDX) just reported a 28% EPS jump on 1.6% revenue growth. That gap is the whole story. When earnings race ahead of sales, it usually means buybacks, asset sales, or cost cuts are doing the heavy lifting, not actual business momentum. Net margins compressed from 8.8% to 8.0% this quarter, which undercuts the cost discipline narrative. At 11.5x forward earnings BDX looks cheap, but the PEG ratio of 10.4x says the market has already figured out the growth isn't there. Cheap for a reason.

Arrow Electronics Is a CEO Search Wearing a Strategy Deck

ARW (NYSE:ARW) held something that was technically an earnings call this quarter. No CFO on the line. No actual Q1 numbers delivered. Interim CEO Bill Austin (a board member since 2020) read what sounded like rehearsed talking points about European software distribution and component consolidation. The strategic ideas buried in the deck are legitimately interesting. The IP&E consolidation thesis, comparing components distribution to semiconductors a decade ago, is worth taking seriously. But without permanent leadership and without real numbers, this is a story you watch, not one you buy into right now.

AAON's Data Center Boom Is Real — The Margins Are Not

AAON, Inc. (NASDAQ:AAON) posted 42.5% revenue growth, almost certainly fueled by data center cooling demand. The bull case writes itself. The problem is that operating margins have fallen nearly five full percentage points from their five-year average, and EPS growth of 29% badly trails that revenue number. You're getting less profit per dollar of revenue as the business scales up, which is the opposite of what a growth premium should look like. At 40.6x forward earnings, the market is paying for execution that AAON's last four quarters (a 54% beat, 35% miss, 13% beat, 15% miss) have not consistently delivered.

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Overlooked Stock

SKYT

SkyWater Technology, Inc.

Most people think American semiconductor manufacturing means TSMC's Arizona plant or Intel's struggling foundry division. SkyWater Technology (NASDAQ:SKYT) is something different, and most investors have never heard of it.

SkyWater is a pure-play U.S. semiconductor foundry based in Bloomington, Minnesota. It makes chips for aerospace, defense, bio-health, and advanced computing, sectors where the Pentagon and federal agencies actively want production to stay on American soil. That's not a marketing pitch. It's a procurement requirement.

The CHIPS Act created real funding lanes for exactly what SkyWater does. Its rad-hard chips (radiation-hardened, designed for satellites and military systems) have almost no domestic competition. The company also has a partnership with the Air Force Research Laboratory that most investors haven't dug into.

This isn't a recommendation. The stock is volatile, the path to profitability is not linear, and TSMC's scale advantages are real. But if you're looking for a domestic semiconductor play that isn't already priced for perfection, this one deserves an hour of your time.

The Contrarian Take

The Golden Dome Is Going to Make Defense Stocks Disappoint

Everyone is piling into Lockheed Martin (NYSE:LMT), RTX (NYSE:RTX), and Kratos (NASDAQ:KTOS) ahead of Golden Dome missile defense spending. The thesis feels airtight: Washington announces a program, money flows, stocks go up.

Here's what that story misses. Large defense programs in the U.S. take years from announcement to contract to revenue. Lockheed's F-35 program was announced in the 1990s. The Pentagon is famously good at spending announcements and famously slow at actually cutting checks. Stocks that price in the spending before the contracts arrive have a habit of going sideways for 18 months while investors wait.

The smarter trade, if there is one, is the companies already inside existing missile defense architecture, not the ones angling for future Golden Dome slots. RTX's Patriot systems and Lockheed's Terminal High Altitude Area Defense work is already funded and flying. The new Golden Dome money is the story everyone is trading. The existing revenue is what most people are ignoring.