Elon Musk Just Warned SpaceX Revenue ‘Will Drop’ If Compute Gets Cheap. Deutsche Bank Raised Its 2028 Forecast $18 Billion Two Days Later

Elon Musk wrote on Sunday that SpaceX revenue “will drop” if computing power becomes plentiful and cheap, and on Tuesday Deutsche Bank raised its 2028 forecast for the company by $18 billion on the view that it will stay scarce. For a retiree who bought 1,000 shares of Space Exploration Technologies Corp. (NASDAQ: SPCX) on its first day of trading, the two statements land on the same $143,090 position.

Musk’s post on X, on the evening of Nov. 8, answered a clip of investor Chamath Palihapitiya arguing that SpaceX could cancel its Anthropic compute contract on 90 days’ notice and re-sign it at double the price. “It works both ways, of course,” Musk wrote. “If compute becomes plentiful and cheap, SpaceX revenue will drop. No crying in the casino for either party.”

Two days later, Deutsche Bank analyst Edison Yu told clients the casino is tilting SpaceX’s way. Voters backed limits on data-center development in 40 of 41 local ballot contests last week, by Ballotpedia’s count, and Texas Governor-elect Gina Hinojosa has pledged to halt new approvals until the legislature sets protections for electricity costs and water. Yu expects that pressure to slow construction, mainly in 2028, which keeps computing capacity scarce and rental prices higher for longer. He raised his 2028 EBITDA forecast for SpaceX by $18 billion to $237.1 billion and his revenue forecast by $18.7 billion to $315.3 billion, and kept a Buy rating and a $250 price target.

Raising a 2028 forecast by $18 billion because of a construction slowdown reads as a bet that compute stays scarce for two more years and SpaceX gets to name its price; the limit of that reading is that Deutsche Bank left the contract repricing out of its numbers, and Musk himself says the price cuts both ways. The bank also notes that SpaceX’s own $24 billion gas plant and computing site in Texas faces the same approval freeze that would help its existing capacity.

What the stock has done since the IPO

SpaceX sold 555,555,555 Class A shares at $135 on June 11 and opened for trading on June 12 at $150. The stock closed that first day at $160.95, hit a record close of $201.80 on June 16, fell to a low close of $108.27 on Aug. 5, and dropped to $123.62 on Nov. 5 after the midterm results. It closed Tuesday at $143.09, up 0.7% on the day, according to Fuse’s daily price history.

That leaves the shares 6% above the IPO price, 29% below the June record, 12% below where they traded a month ago, and 16% above the Nov. 5 close. The market value is about $1.9 trillion. Of 39 analysts in Fuse’s count, 31 rate the stock a buy, 6 a hold and 2 a sell, with an average target of $255, about 78% above Tuesday’s close.

The third-quarter report behind those targets showed revenue of $14.575 billion, up 161% from a year earlier, net income of $4.4 billion, and capital spending of $19.593 billion, more than the quarter’s revenue. SpaceX ended September with 1.7 gigawatts of computing capacity and said it expects 2.5 to 3 gigawatts by year end. Its revenue over the past twelve months was $32 billion, so Deutsche Bank’s 2028 revenue forecast is nearly ten times what the company has just booked.

The retiree who bought on day one

Take a retired engineer, 67, with $2.4 million, most of it in a rollover IRA at Fidelity, who had followed SpaceX for years and bought 1,000 shares in his taxable brokerage account on June 12 at $161. The shares traded between $149.34 and $176.52 that day, so $161 is a mid-afternoon fill. He is a scenario, built to show what the past five months did to a real-sized position, and his numbers come straight from the price history.

He was up $40,800 four days in. He was down $52,730 in August. He is down $17,910 today, an 11% loss, after gaining $19,470 since the Nov. 5 close. If the stock reaches Deutsche Bank’s $250, the position is worth $250,000, a gain of $106,910 from Tuesday’s price.

What Friday adds

The next event on the calendar is Starship Flight 15. The launch window opens Friday, Nov. 13, at 5:45 PM Eastern (4:45 PM at Starbase) and runs 75 minutes, pending the FAA license. Booster 22 is due back at the tower about six and a half minutes after liftoff. Ship 42 goes to orbit, releases 26 Starlink V3 satellites, and about 22 hours later tries the first tower catch of a ship, which has never been done. On the Oct. 20 earnings call Musk said a successful ship catch was “more likely than not,” and on Nov. 6 he wrote that if both catches work, “it will mark the first time that all parts of an orbital rocket return to Earth intact.”

Starship is the vehicle the orbital compute plan rides on, so a clean double catch is the kind of news that moves this stock, and a failure the kind that costs it. Musk endorsed, in the same weekend post stream, a secondhand report that Larry Page expects 99.999% of computing to end up in orbit. A retiree holding $143,090 of the stock is carrying that bet whether he thinks of it that way or not.

The three numbers that decide what he does

The loss is short-term. He bought on June 12, 2026, so a sale before June 12, 2027 books a short-term loss. The $17,910 loss offsets capital gains elsewhere first, and with no gains it cuts ordinary income by up to $3,000 a year, which is worth $660 a year in the 22% bracket and takes six years to use up. Against $17,910 of gains taxed at 15%, the same loss saves $2,686. Buying SpaceX back within 30 days on either side of the sale disallows the loss, per IRS Publication 550.

The position is 6% of his money. At cost it was 6.7% of $2.4 million; today it is 6.0%. A position that size can fall to zero without changing his retirement, which is why he can afford to hold through Friday. It is also why Deutsche Bank’s $250 would add $106,910, about 4.5% to the whole portfolio, and not more.

The forecast is two years out. Deutsche Bank’s $315.3 billion of 2028 revenue is nearly ten times the past twelve months. The stock trades at 46 times forward earnings in Fuse’s data. If the data-center backlash fades, or Anthropic and Alphabet find cheaper capacity, the scarcity Yu is counting on goes away, and Musk has said in writing what happens to revenue then.

The bottom line

The retiree who paid $161,000 on IPO day holds $143,090 today. He has a $17,910 short-term loss he can take before the end of the year, a Friday launch that could move the stock either way, and a Deutsche Bank forecast that says the company earns more when its rivals cannot build. Musk’s own words set the limit on that forecast: the price of compute cuts both ways, and so does a 6% position in a stock that has traded between $108 and $202 in five months.

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