Famous Wall Street Futurist Says ‘Starlink Alone’ Justifies SpaceX’s $2 Trillion Valuation at IPO. Here’s His Math.

SpaceX is heading toward one of the largest equity offerings ever, and one of Wall Street’s most-followed futurists says investors can focus on the Starlink satellite broadband business alone. The Starlink business by itself, he argues, is enough to underwrite a valuation north of $2 trillion.

That is the case Brett Winton, Chief Futurist at ARK Investment Management, laid out on CNBC’s Squawk Box on June 4, 2026. “Their Starlink business alone can justify the valuation,” Winton said, framing the recurring-subscription side of SpaceX as the anchor rather than the speculative long-duration bets that usually dominate SpaceX bull cases.

The IPO Details

SpaceX is pricing its IPO at $135 per share for 555 million shares. Reuters and AdvisorHub reported on the JPMorgan-led roadshow this week, pegging the headline valuation at roughly $1.75 trillion against a $75 billion capital-raising target, with JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon hosting a live, interactive discussion with thousands of high-net-worth clients alongside SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell and CFO Bret Johnsen. Morningstar’s analyst team published a fair value estimate of $780 billion and cited technological hurdles for Starlink and competitive risk to the AI assets.

Yesterday, The Financial Times reported that lead underwriter Goldman Sachs was projecting revenues for SpaceX’s AI division to rise to $322 billion by 2030 from $3.2 billion today. Overall, they forecast $474 billion in sales by 2030 from $18.7 billion today. Clearly, AI is a major part of this IPO pitch. However, ARK’s Winton says SpaceX’s valuation is justified solely by Starlink.

Winton’s Starlink Math

Winton walked through his logic step by step. “They have roughly 500 terabits per second in orbit. And they’re generating really like around $13 billion in revenue based upon that constellation of satellites. They can, with each starship rocket launch 60 terabits a second. So ten launches can duplicate their existing capacity in space,” he said.

Winton anchors capacity to revenue, then argues that Starship’s payload economics let SpaceX add capacity in large, discrete chunks per launch. He closed the segment with the underwriting case: “The position underwrites on the Starlink business alone. I think you’ll see massive revenue scaling in that business over the next couple of years.”

What the S-1 Actually Shows

The filed numbers in the SpaceX S-1 registration statement support the scaling story, while reporting at the segment level rather than at Winton’s Starlink-specific revenue line. Total SpaceX revenues were $18,674 million in 2025, $14,015 million in 2024, and $10,387 million in 2023. The Connectivity segment, which houses Starlink, generated $4,423 million in income from operations and $ 7,168 million in Segment Adjusted EBITDA in 2025.

Subscriber growth is where the case gets tangible. Starlink Subscribers totaled approximately 10.3 million and 5.0 million, up 105% and 91% on a year-over-year basis, in the quarters ended March 31, 2026, and March 31, 2025. Connectivity revenue in Q1 2026 rose 31.6% to $3,257 million, with growth driven by a 104.7% increase in subscribers offset by a 22.9% decline in Starlink Subscriber ARPU. The company estimates a total market opportunity of $1.6 trillion across Starlink Broadband and Starlink Mobile, including approximately $870 billion in broadband.

The Optionality On Top

If Starlink alone underwrites the valuation in Winton’s framework, orbital AI compute is upside that investors get for free. He flagged timing carefully: “We think it will definitely come economically on sides as to when the opportunity really, really builds. For SpaceX, that’s probably a late 2020s, you know, maybe even into the early 2030s timeframe.” The S-1 describes payload scaling toward approximately one million metric tons to orbit annually, powering 100 gigawatts of AI compute, with Starship V3 designed to carry 100 metric tons to Earth’s orbit in a reusable configuration.

Investor Takeaway

Winton’s framing turns the SpaceX IPO from a speculative bet on Mars infrastructure into a bet on a fast-scaling, recurring-revenue broadband business with verifiable subscriber growth in the filing. A $2 trillion valuation already prices in much of the Starlink scaling curve, and the orbital data center thesis is multiple years from commercial proof.