SpaceX’s upcoming stock market debut has become one of the most talked-about IPOs in recent years. The company is expected to raise between $75 billion and $80 billion at a valuation of around $1.75 trillion, potentially making it the biggest IPO ever.
However Steve Eisman, the investor best known for betting against the US housing market before the 2008 financial crisis, says he is staying away from the stock. Eisman said he is “not a fan” of the IPO and believes investors should pay close attention to the company’s financial filings before buying into the hype while speaking on CNBC.
Eisman says the prospectus raises important questions
Eisman said one of the most revealing parts of the IPO filing is how much money SpaceX is now spending. “I think what is probably most important in the prospectus is how capital-intensive SpaceX has become,” Eisman noted. “If you go back to fiscal year 2023 and you compare revenue to capex, capex was only 42% of revenue, and in the most recent first quarter, it was 215% of revenue.” This means that the company is spending far more money on infrastructure and expansion than it was just a few years ago.
He believes AI is driving the spending surge
According to Eisman, much of this increase is linked to SpaceX’s growing focus on artificial intelligence. He argued that the company is no longer being valued mainly as a space exploration or satellite internet business. Instead, it is increasingly positioning itself as an AI infrastructure and services company. Eisman said this shift has made the business much more expensive to run and invest in, which worries him.
Grok is not convincing him
A major part of SpaceX’s AI ambitions comes from xAI, Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company, and its chatbot Grok. However, Eisman said he does not see Grok as a leader in the industry. “Grok, with all due respect to Elon Musk, is not a world-class AI company, and I don’t think anybody speaks of Grok as being at the leading edge.” Even though SpaceX has secured major AI-related partnerships, including a compute deal with AI startup Anthropic, Eisman remains skeptical about the long-term economics of the business.
AI is becoming expensive and crowded, he says
Eisman said the bigger issue goes beyond SpaceX and affects the entire technology sector. He pointed to Google’s recent $80 billion capital raise as evidence of how much money companies are pouring into data centers and AI infrastructure.
According to Eisman, AI companies are now spending enormous amounts of money, but the products they are creating are becoming increasingly similar.
“Despite the incredible sums of money that are being spent, what’s being produced in terms of LLMs and agentic AI, which is great, is not really differentiable,” he added. “It’s very commoditized. People are switching constantly from one to the other. There are no moats, so for all the money that’s being spent, what’s being created, it seems to me, is a commodity.”
The filing reads like science fiction, says Eisman
Beyond the financial concerns, Eisman also found parts of the prospectus unusual. “What I love about the S-1 is that it reads like a science fiction novel. It really does.”
He pointed to some of the company’s long-term ambitions, including asteroid mining and its goal of helping humanity expand beyond Earth. “My favorite part of the prospectus is that one of the things that SpaceX wants to do is asteroid mining. I thought that was kind of funny.”
SpaceX is no longer just a space company
One reason Eisman is cautious is that the company going public is much broader than many investors may realise. The IPO combines SpaceX’s space operations with X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, and xAI, the artificial intelligence company behind Grok. In Eisman’s view, this combination has transformed the business into a massive AI spender rather than a straightforward space technology company.
AI business is losing billions
The numbers speak the scale of the challenge. SpaceX’s AI division generated roughly $3.2 billion in revenue in 2025, but it also recorded an operating loss of about $6.4 billion. Those losses continued into 2026. To support its AI operations, the company has signed major computing agreements. Anthropic is expected to pay around $1.25 billion per month for output from xAI’s Colossus data center, while Google has agreed to a separate deal worth about $920 million per month.
He believes investors are really betting on AI, not space
Eisman said many investors still think they are buying into a space exploration story. However, he believes the company’s future valuation is now tied largely to artificial intelligence. “The entire company is being bet on AI in terms of its future, not on space and not on Starlink,” Eisman said.
The company’s own projections support that argument. SpaceX estimates its total addressable market at $28.5 trillion, with the vast majority coming from AI opportunities rather than space exploration or satellite connectivity.
Less than $2 trillion of that figure is tied to the space and internet businesses that most people traditionally associate with SpaceX.
Valuation concerns remain
Eisman also questioned whether the IPO valuation makes sense. According to his calculations, SpaceX is seeking a valuation close to 100 times annual sales. By comparison, AI chip giant NVIDIA trades at roughly 14 times revenue despite growing much faster.
Because of that, Eisman believes the stock could trade more on excitement and investor enthusiasm than on financial fundamentals. “The entire company is being bet on AI in terms of its future, not on SpaceX and not on Starlink.”