An Oppenheimer Analyst Thinks SpaceX Could Be Worth $10 Trillion in Five Years

Tim Horan, Oppenheimer’s satellite and AI infrastructure analyst, went on CNBC Monday to defend a price target that sounds absurd until you back into the math. He kept his buy rating and $250 price target on SpaceX as the stock fell in its third consecutive session of decline, and floated a five-year valuation of $10 trillion. For context, that would make SpaceX (NASDAQ:SPCX) worth roughly the GDP of Germany and Japan combined.

The stock is having a rough debut. Shares are at $158, down from $192.50 a week earlier, and CNBC noted the average post-IPO buyer is almost underwater after the slide, with the five-day volume-weighted average sitting near $181. Tuesday brought a 5.34% bounce to $162.86, but Reddit has spent the past week dissecting threads with titles like “The math isn’t mathing on the SpaceX IPO” and “SPCX – Beware, institutional money is NOT buying this trash on the open market”. Horan is leaning into that doubt.

The vertical integration thesis

What SpaceX is, in Horan’s framing, is no longer a launch company. “The company we think has doubled their valuation in the last six months by entering the AI market,” he told CNBC, “and we think they’re going to continue to do incredibly creative things.” The pivot point was the early-2026 acquisition of xAI, which folded Grok and its X-platform integration into SpaceX as a core business pillar.

That repositioning matters because of what Horan thinks the addressable market looks like. “They think AI is a $25 trillion TAM, and they are the only vertically integrated company that can attack every segment of this and really disrupt an awful lot of industries,” he said. Then the part that sounds like science fiction. “SpaceX is making their own solar panels. They want to make their own chips… build a fab that will create five times the amount of chips that the whole world is producing.”

Take that claim with appropriate skepticism. But the underlying point survives even if the fab is half that size. SpaceX already controls the launch stack. It launched more than 80% of the world’s mass to orbit annually since 2023, with Falcon rockets at over 99% mission success. Owning the rockets, the satellites, the ground network, the AI model, and eventually the chips is exactly the moat the bull case requires.

Starlink as the funding engine

The cash to fund all of this is supposed to come from Starlink. “We think Starlink will be worth roughly $1 trillion,” Horan said. “Over the next 5 to 10 years they’re going to increase capacity a hundred fold. They already have about 12 million broadband subscribers globally. We think they could easily support a couple of hundred million.”

Moreover, the constellation is already enormous. As of March 31, 2026, Starlink served customers across 164 countries through roughly 9,600 low-Earth-orbit satellites, with a satellite-to-mobile layer extending coverage to about 30 countries. There is also a quietly compelling tailwind. A recent GAO assessment noted the Department of Energy projects data centers will account for up to 12% of U.S. electrical demand by 2028, driven by AI, and that since January 2026 the FCC has received three applications from U.S. companies for large satellite constellations operating as orbital data centers. If compute migrates toward orbit, the company that owns cheap heavy-lift launch capacity collects rent from everyone.

What can go wrong

Horan named the near-term risk himself. “Short term it’s really getting the starship to work. We need the starship to kind of get the new communications satellites up.” Without Starship reaching reliable operational cadence, the hundredfold Starlink capacity expansion does not happen, and the $1 trillion in revenue Musk has targeted stays a slide.

For investors, the gap between Horan’s view and market consensus shows in the price action itself. SpaceX, registered with the SEC, currently trades around $158, well off its 52-week high of $225.64. The Atlantic this week described the stock as “a financial instrument for Musk, a meme, and a testament to the irrationality of the modern stock market.” Horan’s $250 target and $10 trillion long-term call assume the meme grows into the moat. The next twelve Starship launches will settle the argument.