Elon Musk claims SpaceX will be worth more than $100 trillion in less than 10 years — unless a war hits

It’s the latest in a long string of bombastic predictions from Musk about one of his companies. This one, though, could raise more eyebrows than previous ones.

Fundamentals vs. hype

Baron, an avowed Musk bull, insisted the fundamentals of SpaceX were strong.

“I think it will be worth $20 trillion, $30 trillion, $50 trillion. Elon thinks I’m way low,” he said in an interview with Columbia Business School on Oct. 13. “This is not pulling numbers out of the air. I think Starlink alone, in the next 10 years, is going to be worth somewhere around $14 trillion, $15 trillion and it’s still at the very early stages of that growth.”

But some investors still view SpaceX with a cautious eye. The company’s $1.77 trillion valuation at the time of its debut on the Nasdaq meant it traded at a very steep multiple of its sales, even as it continued to post giant quarterly losses. And S&P Global Ratings is projecting the company won’t have positive cash flow until at least 2029.

Several notable analysts warned investors prior to the IPO about the company’s boasts versus real-world risk.

For instance, Aswath Damodaran, a professor at NYU’s Stern School of Business who is best known as the “dean of valuation” said he believed SpaceX’s value at the IPO to be $1.3 trillion, nearly half a trillion dollars less than the company was claiming.