SpaceX Becomes the Fourth Largest Public Company Globally by Market Value
NASDAQ-listed SpaceX (SPCX.O) saw its intraday gains expand to about 17%, briefly raising its market value to approximately $2.94 trillion, surpassing Microsoft's valuation of about $2.93 trillion, making it the fourth largest public company by market value, behind only three mega-cap companies including Apple.
Latest data shows that SpaceX's current market value is about $2.93–2.94 trillion, while Apple's (AAPL.O) market value, ranked third, is about $4.39 trillion. The gap in scale between SpaceX and Apple remains close to $1.5 trillion, indicating that its valuation has firmly established itself among the top tier of global market values, but there is still significant space between it and the "big three".
In terms of capital flow, the continuous surge in SpaceX's stock price post-IPO, combined with increased buying power from passive and thematic funds, has allowed it to surpass the market values of Amazon and Microsoft in a short time. The high-growth narrative of aerospace + satellites + AI has become the main focus for capital. Meanwhile, mature giants like Apple maintain higher absolute market values through stable cash flows, creating a division of labor between growth capital chasing "high-elasticity SpaceX" and defensive capital favoring "cash cow tech blue chips".
Source: Public Information
ABAB AI Insight
From historical behavior, SpaceX has long raised its valuation in the private market as a non-public company, but with relatively limited liquidity; once it completed its IPO and entered the index and passive fund visibility, its growth narrative quickly combined with tradable chips, forming a dual amplification similar to Tesla's "story + liquidity" around 2020. This is a key background for its rapid rise past Amazon and Microsoft, closely approaching Apple's market value tier.
In terms of capital pathways, SpaceX's valuation is no longer solely tied to its rocket launch business but is viewed by the market as a combination asset package of "rocket launches + Starlink satellite internet + space infrastructure + AI computing power and data networks"; this has led capital to assign it multiples close to or even higher than typical cloud computing and platform tech stocks, front-loading expected cash flows from future Mars colonization, global satellite networks, and edge computing into its current market value, which is significantly different from the traditional "segment valuation + cash flow discount" pricing logic of industrial enterprises.
In horizontal comparison, Microsoft's and Apple's market values are more anchored in stable cash flows from mature software subscriptions, cloud services, and hardware ecosystems, while SpaceX is closer to Amazon's state during its e-commerce + cloud computing overlap: current cash flows have not yet fully materialized, but the market bets on its first-mover advantage in new infrastructures (satellite internet, interplanetary transport) at an extremely high discount multiple; this means that the capital market is pricing SpaceX with a hybrid perspective of "national-level infrastructure + tech platform" rather than as a single industry company.
Structurally, SpaceX's market value surge symbolizes a "shift in infrastructure pricing power": historically, the highest global market values were concentrated in companies controlling information, software, and consumer terminals, but now capital is willing to price "physical infrastructure + space corridors + network sovereignty" at equal or even higher multiples; this effectively concentrates some long-term infrastructure discourse power, which should have been held by sovereign nations, space agencies, and traditional telecom satellite companies, into a high-value private tech group, making "who controls orbital resources and extraterrestrial networks" gradually as important a capital proposition as "who controls cloud and operating systems."