SpaceX's $1.75 trillion IPO leaves capital hunting for RKLB, ASTS, LUNR

SpaceX went public at $1.75 trillion. Here's where the money goes next.

The largest IPO in history closed last month, and the number that keeps sticking with me is $1.75 trillion. That is the valuation SpaceX commanded when it finally listed. For context, that is larger than every European bank combined, larger than Berkshire Hathaway, larger than any single company that came public in the last decade. The institutions that missed it, and there were thousands of them, are now sitting on cash earmarked for space exposure with nowhere obvious to put it.

This is where things get interesting. The capital doesn't evaporate. It migrates.

Rocket Lab USA (NASDAQ:RKLB) is the first and most logical destination. It is the only other company currently flying an operational orbital rocket on a commercial basis. Everything else is either suborbital, pre-revenue, or a component supplier. RKLB is flying missions now. Before the SpaceX IPO, a generalist portfolio manager had limited reason to study Rocket Lab closely. Now they have every reason, because RKLB is essentially the only instrument available if you want to own launch capacity and missed the window on SpaceX.

The second-order beneficiary is AST SpaceMobile (NASDAQ:ASTS). Its thesis, satellite-to-phone broadband without any special hardware, was always plausible but speculative. A publicly traded SpaceX at $1.75 trillion is an implicit market endorsement of the entire satellite connectivity category. SpaceX's Starlink proved that people will pay for coverage where terrestrial networks fail. ASTS is betting the next leap is eliminating the dish entirely. That bet looks less like science fiction when the category leader is valued like a top-five US company.

Then there is Intuitive Machines (NASDAQ:LUNR), which occupies a different and arguably underappreciated position. LUNR doesn't compete with SpaceX. It buys from SpaceX and sells to NASA. Its lunar landers ride Falcon 9 rockets to the Moon under contracts that stretch into the billions. When SpaceX's valuation re-rates, NASA's counterparties re-rate too, because the underlying capability just got a market price stamp. Institutions trying to model the value of a lunar services contract now have a reference point they didn't have six months ago.

The mechanism worth tracing here is not just sentiment. It is mandate expansion. Pension funds, sovereign wealth funds, and large asset managers that had no framework for pricing private space companies now have a public comparable. SpaceX at $1.75 trillion gives every analyst a denominator. RKLB, ASTS, and LUNR all get measured against it, and right now all three look small against what the sector is apparently worth.

The bear case is straightforward: SpaceX's valuation reflects years of Starlink subscriber growth, US government launch monopoly, and Starship development that nobody else has. The smaller names don't inherit those advantages, they just inherit the attention. Attention without fundamentals is a trade, not an investment.

But the fundamentals across all three have been improving independently of the IPO. RKLB is scaling Neutron. ASTS completed its first commercial BlueBird satellite blocks. LUNR has a multi-mission NASA pipeline. The IPO didn't create these stories. It illuminated them for a new class of buyer who now has the permission structure to act.

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Quick Takes

Three more stories worth knowing about

Golden Dome contracts are starting to look real

Washington's missile defense ambitions have a history of being ambitious in press releases and underwhelming in appropriations. But the current spending trajectory is different. Lockheed Martin (NYSE:LMT) and RTX (NYSE:RTX) are already embedded in interceptor and sensor programs that predate the Golden Dome branding, which means any new money flows into existing programs rather than greenfield procurement timelines. Kratos Defense (NASDAQ:KTOS) is the higher-risk, higher-reward angle: its autonomous systems thesis fits the Pentagon's public push toward distributed, lower-cost defense architectures. Whether the Golden Dome actually gets built at scale, the procurement machinery is already moving.

Anthropic's IPO is going to pull every AI-native stock up with it

Anthropic filed confidentially in June and is targeting a fall listing. The number being discussed is somewhere north of $50 billion, possibly well north. When it lands, it will do for AI-native software what SpaceX just did for space: give institutional allocators a public comparable and a permission structure to build exposure they have been reluctant to build in private markets. SoundHound AI (NASDAQ:SOUN) and UiPath (NYSE:PATH) are the obvious beneficiaries in the application layer. Serve Robotics (NASDAQ:SERV) sits at the intersection of AI and physical deployment, which is the category that tends to get re-rated last and most dramatically.

Credo Technology is connecting the data centers everyone else is building

Credo Technology Group (NASDAQ:CRDO) makes high-speed connectivity solutions, specifically the active electrical cables and SerDes chiplets that let hyperscale data centers move data between racks without thermal and signal degradation. As AI clusters grow denser and the distances between GPUs shrink, the connectivity problem becomes as critical as the compute problem. Microsoft, Amazon, and Google are all building at a pace that requires Credo's solutions. The company sells directly to hyperscalers and is growing revenue at rates that make most of its semiconductor peers look slow. It doesn't generate the headlines that Nvidia does, but it is solving the same fundamental constraint from a different angle.

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Overlooked Stock

KSPI

Joint Stock Company Kaspi.kz

Kaspi.kz (NASDAQ:KSPI) is a Kazakh super-app that functions as the dominant payments network, e-commerce marketplace, and consumer lender across Kazakhstan, with expansion into Azerbaijan and Ukraine. The comparison that comes closest is WeChat Pay crossed with Amazon crossed with Affirm, running inside a country of 19 million people with rapidly growing smartphone penetration and limited legacy banking competition. The business generates extraordinary free cash flow, pays a substantial dividend, and trades at a fraction of the multiple a comparable US-listed fintech would command. The risk is real: Kazakhstan is not a tier-one market, the regulatory environment is opaque by Western standards, and geopolitical proximity to Russia creates noise that US investors find uncomfortable. But the underlying business metrics, user growth, take rates, loan book quality, would be celebrated if this company were incorporated in Dublin instead of Almaty. Worth a serious look before the rest of the market notices what the numbers actually say.

The Contrarian Take

The SpaceX IPO didn't validate space investing. It may have peaked it.

Everyone is treating SpaceX's $1.75 trillion listing as the starting gun for institutional space investing. I think it might be closer to the finishing line. Here is the problem: SpaceX's valuation assumes Starlink reaches hundreds of millions of subscribers, Starship enables a genuinely new commercial launch economy, and no serious competitor emerges in the next decade. All of that may be true. But when you buy RKLB or ASTS or LUNR as a SpaceX proxy, you are getting a fraction of the capability at a valuation that has just been pulled upward by the most successful space company ever built. The capital flooding in now is not smart money running ahead of a trend. It is momentum money running toward a story that already happened. The time to buy space exposure was 2023, when RKLB was trading under $4 and nobody wanted it. The IPO euphoria will pass, and what's left will need to justify its price on standalone fundamentals.