SpaceX President and Chief Operating Officer Gwynne Shotwell celebrates with family and other SpaceX employees at the Nasdaq Marketsite in in New York after the SpaceX initial public offering on June 12, 2026.
Spencer Platt | Getty Images News | Getty Images
Days after Elon Musk's SpaceX made its debut on the Nasdaq, much ink has been spilt over the company, the valuation, and its place in the burgeoning tech space.
The company's stratospheric IPO has made founder Elon Musk the world's first trillionaire, and if the first day's price action is anything to go by, investors are still very optimistic. SpaceX closed at $161, jumping 19% from its offer price of $135 per share.
Speaking to CNBC's "Squawk Box Asia," Steve Westly, founder and managing partner of The Westly Group and a former board member of Musk's Tesla, noted that the company attracted a lot of retail investors, but added that it have to deliver results, and fast.
"Retail investors bought $100 billion in shares, and you've got to ask the question, are some of them going to get panicky if SpaceX misses a few quarters, because this stuff is not easy to do."
In a now-deleted post on X, Musk said that SpaceX "might be able" to reach approximately $1 trillion in revenue by 2030, and added that he would be "surprised" if revenue is not greater than that figure by 2031.
"Investors at SpaceX, I believe, will get pretty grumpy after three or four quarters if he doesn't meet some of the growth projections that they made in the S1," Westly added, referring to the SEC filing used by companies planning on going public.
Some views that the trillion-dollar IPO were overvalued were swirling ahead of SpaceX's debut.
Matthew Maley, Chief Market Strategist at asset management firm Miller Tabak. said that "we'll merely say that we agree [the IPO] went very well, but we also think it is much too overvalued."
While the stock does not have a formal price-to earnings ratio, Musk's $1.75 trillion valuation currently reflects a P/E ratio of almost 100 times.
In comparison, Nvidia, arguably the world's most valuable company, trades with a P/E ratio of just over 31 times, while Apple trades at about 35 times.
This overvalued view is also shared by Morningstar equity analyst Nicolas Owens, who said last week that the stock is "significantly overvalued."
The firm has a fair value estimate for SpaceX of $63 per share, and said on June 11 that the company had only a 7% chance of hitting its "moonshot" scenario of $154 a share.
Nonetheless, the stock could prove to be a good buy if investors are willing to ride it out.
"We do believe that very long-term investors will do fine," Maley said, with Westly also expressing optimism on the company's future path.
"No one's going to hand this to them. He and the team there, I think Gwynne Shotwell is extraordinary, have some tough hills to climb, but if anybody can do it, it may be the combination of Gwynne and Elon," Westly said, referring to SpaceX's president and chief operating officer.
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