SpaceX IPO Fears Are Overblown, But the AI Bet Is Real

Key Points

• SpaceX's S-1 filing attributes $26.5 trillion of its $28.5 trillion total addressable market to enterprise AI, making it more an AI company than a space company.
• The S&P 500 will not fast-track SpaceX's index inclusion, meaning most 401(k) holders face no near-term involuntary exposure to the IPO.
• Analyst Brett Eversole sees a potential 30-40% post-IPO pullback within 12 months, drawing a parallel to Meta Platforms' nearly 50% decline after its 2012 listing.

The SpaceX NASDAQ: SPCX IPO is nearly here, and the noise around it is deafening. The largest IPO in market history. A $75 billion raise. Early index inclusion. Passive investors on the hook. Each headline lands like a warning shot—but Brett Eversole of Stansberry Research thinks most of the fear is misplaced, and that investors focused on the wrong questions are going to miss the real story entirely.

The $75 Billion Number Isn't What It Looks Like

Context is everything, and most of the SpaceX IPO anxiety falls apart once you apply it.

The Nasdaq trades roughly $500 billion in daily volume. The NYSE trades around $600 billion. On an active day, U.S. markets can move two to three times those figures. Against that backdrop, a $75 billion capital raise—even stretched to $85 or $86 billion with the overallotment—is not a system-level event. It's a large transaction in a very large market.

The private markets have already absorbed comparable scale without drama. Anthropic raised $65 billion in a single private round last month. OpenAI raised $122 billion earlier this year. Capital is abundant, and the market has proven it can handle these numbers.

The fear that investors will sell existing holdings to fund SpaceX purchases is worth examining, but Eversole puts it in the same frame. Even if $75 billion worth of NVIDIA NASDAQ: NVDA were sold in a single session to fund the IPO, it would represent roughly a 5% drawdown on a stock with a nearly $5 trillion market cap. Meaningful, but not a market-shaking event.

The Index Inclusion Story Is More Complicated Than the Headlines

One of the louder concerns has been that SpaceX is receiving special treatment for index inclusion—fast-tracked into major indexes, with the cost effectively passed on to 401(k) holders and passive investors.

The Nasdaq has confirmed it will include SpaceX after 15 days, bypassing the standard three-to-six-month waiting period. That part is real. But the S&P 500 is a different story. Despite reports that rule changes were being considered to accelerate SpaceX's inclusion, the S&P has confirmed it will not change its criteria. That means SpaceX faces a minimum 12-month seasoning period and must meet profitability requirements before it can be added to S&P or Dow Jones indexes.

The scenario where retail investors become involuntary bag-holders—absorbing a high-priced IPO through their passive index funds—simply isn't the near-term reality for the majority of 401(k) accounts.

SpaceX Isn't a Space Company

This is where the story gets genuinely interesting. Eversole points to the company's S-1 filing, where SpaceX lays out a total addressable market it estimates at $28.5 trillion—nearly equal to U.S. GDP. Of that figure, roughly $2 trillion is attributed to the space side of the business: launch services, Starlink, satellite internet. The remaining $26.5 trillion is attributed to enterprise AI.

SpaceX, in its own telling, is an AI company.

The integration with xAI, the frontier model development, the data center buildout—these aren't side projects. They represent where the company sees its future revenue. Investors buying into SpaceX on the rocket narrative may not realize they're actually making a long-duration AI bet.

The Facebook Parallel—And What It Means for Timing

Eversole draws a comparison to Meta Platforms NASDAQ: META when it went public in 2012. Meta was listed at a roughly $100 billion valuation, which seemed enormous at the time, but the company hadn't yet solved mobile monetization. Within six months, the stock had fallen nearly 50%. It recovered and then some, but investors who waited had a far better entry point.

The parallel to SpaceX isn't a prediction. It's a pattern. A large, well-known company going public at a high valuation while key revenue drivers are still years away from full development. Eversole's read: the IPO is unlikely to be priced to fail, but patience could be rewarded. A 30–40% pullback in the next 12 months would not be surprising, and that entry could look considerably more attractive than the IPO price.

The AI Story Has More Room to Run

The bigger picture, Eversole argues, is that the AI boom is not in its final innings. His framing: year one through three was infrastructure—data centers, compute, hyperscaler CapEx. That build is ongoing and accelerating, with data center spending projected to approach $700 billion this year and potentially $1 trillion annually by 2028.

What's changed in 2026 is the emergence of Phase Two: enterprise sales. Anthropic's revenue trajectory, from roughly $4.5 billion in 2025 to a $47 billion annualized run rate, is, in Eversole's view, the clearest signal that AI products are now being sold at scale into businesses. Phase Three, the one that historically generates the biggest gains and the most dangerous valuations, is ROI validation: the moment enterprises can demonstrate that AI spending is generating measurable returns. That phase hasn't fully arrived yet.

The risk Eversole flags is structural. Historically, extended bull markets tied to technological innovation have ended with a blow-off top followed by a prolonged period of flat or negative returns — the dot-com bust left the market without a new high for 13 years. He believes this cycle will follow a similar arc. The window for outsized gains may be measured in years, not decades, and the investors who benefit most will be the ones who recognize where they are in the cycle.

The SpaceX IPO is a chapter in that story. But according to Eversole, it's not the most important one.