Elon Musk Sees a Path to SpaceX Topping Earth’s Economy as It Takes On AT&T

Elon Musk has a habit of pricing SpaceX against things that are not companies. His newest benchmark is the planet: in a post on X, the SpaceX chief executive said he sees a path to the rocket and satellite maker being worth far more than the entire Earth economy. Most of the coverage has treated the line as a maths problem. The more useful reading starts with what SpaceX did on the same day.

That Thursday, SpaceX announced it was buying a nationwide block of low-band airwaves to turn Starlink Mobile into an American phone carrier, and shares of AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile sank after the closing bell. One announcement was a slogan. The other was a business plan still waiting on a regulator, and it was the one the market reacted to.

What “orders of magnitude” would actually require

The quote in full: “This will sound super crazy, but I see a path to SpaceX being worth orders of magnitude more than the current Earth economy.” Business Insider ran the arithmetic. The International Monetary Fund projected in April that world output would reach $126 trillion this year. SpaceX closed Thursday with a market capitalisation of about $2.2 trillion, so the global economy is roughly 57 times larger. “Orders of magnitude”, plural, means at least a hundredfold, which puts Musk’s floor above $12 quadrillion and would require the stock to rise about 5,500-fold.

Musk softened the line within a day. “‘Seeing a path’ is not a statement of extreme confidence that we will achieve that outcome,” he wrote on Friday. “Just means that I believe there is such a path and the probability of achieving it is not zero.” A claim with no number, no date and a non-zero probability attached is not a forecast. It is a mood.

The analysts Business Insider asked split along familiar lines. Russ Mould, investment director at AJ Bell, read it as a bet on colonies and off-world resources, then said any cash flows from that future deserve an “extremely high” discount rate. Ipek Ozkardeskaya, senior analyst at Swissquote Bank, was blunter: “What he doesn’t say is how much it will cost to get there!” Neil Wilson, investor strategist at Saxo UK, called the post “a bit of classic Musk hype and theatre” and told investors to “focus on what’s going on under the hood.”

Under the hood: airwaves, not asteroids

Under the hood that week was spectrum. SpaceX agreed to buy Grain Management’s nationwide 800 MHz portfolio, up to 14 megahertz of paired spectrum with licences covering nearly the whole US population. The price was not disclosed and the deal still needs approval from the Federal Communications Commission. SpaceX said the licences close one of the last major technical gaps for Starlink Mobile and open the way for it to become a major US mobile operator, CNBC reported. In practical terms, they are meant to deliver the indoor coverage that satellites alone struggle to provide.

Wall Street took that seriously in a way it did not take the quadrillion. By 5 p.m. Eastern, AT&T was down 7.3% in after-hours trading and T-Mobile and Verizon had each lost 6.6%, while SpaceX edged up 1.5%, according to Quiver Quantitative. The same week, the FCC authorised a next-generation Starlink Mobile constellation of 15,000 direct-to-device satellites.

The numbers that carry the stock

The realistic case is demanding enough on its own. SpaceX reported second-quarter revenue of $7.8 billion, up 92% from a year earlier, and a net loss of $541 million, narrower than the $1 billion it lost twelve months before. Starlink is the company’s main cash engine and, so far, its only profitable business. Consensus estimates compiled by TIKR run from $45.1 billion in revenue this year to about $200 billion in 2028.

Phones alone cannot close that gap. JPMorgan sizes the entire US mobile market at roughly $240 billion and does not expect Starlink Mobile to meaningfully challenge it, which leaves most of the growth to AI computing, a build-out SpaceX plans to fund partly with $40 billion of debt. Wilson’s caveat lands here: SpaceX is “massively exposed to AI bubble risk and relies on the debt financing bandwagon to keep rolling.”

Musk told analysts in August that SpaceX internally projects $1 trillion in revenue by 2030, with a “non-zero chance” of getting there a year early. Multiply even that a hundredfold and it is still less than 1% of the valuation he now sketches. Barchart’s Mohit Oberoi has listed the precedents: a Tesla worth more than Apple and Saudi Aramco combined, an Optimus robot adding $25 trillion in market value, a million robotaxis by 2020.

The quadrillion will get the reposts. The number that decides what SpaceX is worth next year sits with the FCC: a block of 800 MHz licences that T-Mobile sold to Grain only in August and may now have to compete against.

Tags: Elon Musk, SpaceX, Starlink, AT&T, stock valuations