Cathie Wood unveils bold revenue projection for Elon Musk's SpaceX
Most "biggest IPO ever" stories come and go without changing how regular investors actually think about their money. The ticker pops, a few hedge funds rearrange their books, and the headline fades by Monday morning.
Once in a while, one comes along that forces you to redo your retirement spreadsheet.
SpaceX has been the white whale of private markets for almost a decade. Accredited investors with seven-figure account minimums have been able to nibble through secondary platforms such as Forge or EquityZen, but the average 401(k) holder watching Falcon 9s land on social media has been locked outside the gate.
That gate is finally swinging open this summer. SpaceX confidentially filed a draft S-1 targeting a $1.75 trillion valuation and a $75 billion raise, Reuters reported.
Now Ark Invest's Cathie Wood is making the most aggressive call yet about what comes after the opening bell, and her thesis hinges on a business line most Wall Street models do not yet include.
Speaking at the Milken Institute Global Conference on May 6, she said SpaceX's orbital data center plans could push revenue "orders of magnitude higher," Benzinga confirmed.
Wood's pitch from the Milken stage
Wood sat down with Carol Massar and Joe Mathieu at Milken in Beverly Hills and pulled the curtain back on numbers her own firm has not yet published.
"We have not added data centers, orbital data centers in," she said of Ark's existing SpaceX model. "However, our preliminary work suggests that that part of the business could take SpaceX from a revenue generation point of view, orders of magnitude higher. Ten, 20 times higher," she added in the same Bloomberg interview.
Related: Cathie Wood sells another $15.6M of surging semiconductor stock
That is on top of a model that already pegs SpaceX at a $2.5 trillion enterprise value by 2030 in the base case.
She is not casually talking about her book. SpaceX is the single largest holding in the Ark Venture Fund (ARKVX), with the position alone scaled past $850 million, according to Benzinga.
Demand, in her telling, is voracious. The supply-demand imbalance she sees coming will produce an opening pop followed by sharp swings, which is why the IPO "will be volatile," Wood told Bloomberg.
Photo by Sundry Photography on Getty Images
How orbital data centers rewrite the SpaceX math
The business line Wood is pointing at did not really exist on paper a year ago. SpaceX merged with Elon Musk's xAI earlier in 2026, valuing the combined entity at roughly $1.25 trillion, per The Motley Fool.
The pitch from Musk himself is straightforward. Launch up to a million data center satellites into low Earth orbit, tap the always-on solar power available above the atmosphere, and side-step the land-use and electricity fights that have already broken out around terrestrial AI buildouts.
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"You're power constrained on Earth," Musk said in a March product event. "Space has the advantage that it's always sunny," he told the audience, reported NPR.
When I cross-checked Wood's 10x to 20x revenue framing against current SpaceX disclosures, the gap was wide enough to drive a Falcon 9 through.
SpaceX is on track for about $20 billion in 2026 revenue, much of it from Starlink, TechMarketBriefs reported. A 20x multiple would put long-term annual revenue near $400 billion. That is roughly what Apple (AAPL) brought in last year.
A few numbers behind the case Wood is pointing at:
- 2026 SpaceX revenue projection of approximately $20 billion, TechStackIPO noted, citing IPO disclosures
- Orbital constellation of up to one million data center satellites, SpaceNews reported
- SpaceX-xAI combined valuation of about $1.25 trillion at merger, according to The Motley Fool
- $20 billion budget for the new TeraFab chip facility supplying the constellation, Data Center Dynamics confirmed
Not everyone buys the math. OpenAI chief Sam Altman called space-based data centers "ridiculous" for the current decade, said Fox Business.
What SpaceX's projected revenue means for your portfolio
Here is where things actually matter for the reader who has never bought a private share in their life. The SpaceX IPO is being structured with a roughly 30% retail allocation, three times the typical Wall Street norm, TechStackIPO explained.
That is unusual. Saudi Aramco's record-setting offering carved out almost nothing for individual investors. Facebook's IPO sat near 25% but was widely criticized for shutting out smaller buyers in practice.
For TheStreet readers, the practical question is whether to chase the open or wait for the dust to settle.
I looked at the lockup math, the underwriter stack of Morgan Stanley (MS), Goldman (GS), JPMorgan (JPM), Bank of America (BAC), and Citigroup (C), and the supply-demand setup Wood described. My read is that volatility will be the defining feature of the first six months. Wood said the same thing on stage at Milken.
Three things are worth flagging if you are weighing exposure.
- The orbital data center thesis is unproven on the revenue line. SpaceX itself flagged Starship execution risk in its draft S-1, reported Reuters.
- Retail demand is real. Wood is not the only one calling it. Investor appetite was characterized as voracious, said Yahoo Finance, citing the same Bloomberg interview.
- The cleanest indirect plays remain the Ark Venture Fund (ARKVX) and the Ark Space and Defense Innovation ETF (ARKX). Both give you SpaceX exposure without front-running an IPO that everyone agrees will whip around.
What to watch as the SpaceX public S-1 release lands
The public S-1 release is the next visible domino, and it is expected before the SpaceX roadshow begins.
Once that hits, every analyst on the street has to lock in a number, and Wood's 10x revenue framing will look either prescient or wildly out over its skis. The same quarter that publishes those analyst targets will also publish the first verifiable Starlink subscriber and revenue numbers in years.
For most readers, this is a roughly $20 billion private company being asked to grow into a $400 billion public one on the strength of an unbuilt orbital data center business. That is the bet.
Wood thinks the bet is conservative. Altman thinks it is ridiculous. Musk has the rocket schedule and the chip fab to actually settle the argument.
The first share trades go off in roughly six weeks. Whether your retirement account ends up holding SpaceX directly, through a fund, or not at all, the next 60 days will tell us how much of Wood's orbital thesis the market is willing to pay for.
Related: Cathie Wood buys $14.9 million of tumbling AI stock
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This story was originally published May 18, 2026 at 9:47 AM.