CNBC Investing Club Adds SpaceX to Its Watch List of Stocks to Consider

The CNBC Investing Club has put SpaceX on its Bullpen list of stocks to watch, as it looks for fresh ideas now that its portfolio has narrowed to 31 positions. The club described the company, founded by Elon Musk in 2002, as a high-profile artificial intelligence play.

SpaceX went public in June at $135 per share and opened for trading at $150. The stock has been volatile since then. It reached an intraday high of nearly $226 within days of the listing, fell to around $105 in early August, and has since recovered to the $140s.

The company reports three segments: Space, which covers rockets and satellites; Connectivity, which is Starlink; and SI, short for Super Intelligence and formerly labeled AI. In its late-May IPO filing, SpaceX estimated a total addressable market of $28.5 trillion, including $370 billion for Space, $1.6 trillion for Connectivity and $26.5 trillion for SI. The club did not weigh in on how realistic those figures are, saying only that they show the scale of the opportunity the company sees.

SI is the fastest-growing unit. Third-quarter revenue reached $7.56 billion, up from $2.56 billion in the second quarter and $813 million a year earlier. SpaceX is building out AI infrastructure in Memphis, including its Colossus and Colossus II supercomputers. It can use that computing power to train its Grok model or lease capacity to outside customers. Anthropic's S-1 filing, made public earlier this week, shows it has agreed to spend up to $120.5 billion over the coming years on SpaceX compute. On the latest earnings call, Musk said he expects 2.5 to 3 gigawatts of additional compute online by the end of 2026, and is confident of adding another 10 gigawatts in 2027.

Starlink is currently the most profitable part of the business, posting $2.37 billion in operating profit in the third quarter. The service, which began launching satellites in 2019, competes with broadband providers such as Verizon, AT&T and Comcast, especially in rural and underserved areas. It added 1.6 million consumer subscribers in the quarter, bringing its global total to just under 14 million, not counting hundreds of thousands of enterprise and aviation customers. Starlink has partnered with three of the four major U.S. wireless carriers and several leading international airlines. United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby said on a recent earnings call that Starlink has become a factor in which airline customers choose.

In its Space segment, SpaceX is the world's top launch provider. It points to two growth paths: increasing launch payload capacity and establishing a lunar economy that includes cargo transport, manufacturing and energy production on the moon. Making the Starship spacecraft fully reusable could sharply raise launch frequency, though the engineering challenges are complex.

On valuation, SpaceX earned an adjusted 35 cents per share in the third quarter, well above analyst forecasts of about 13 cents. After losses in the first and second quarters, analysts expect 32 cents per share for calendar 2026, which puts the stock at 451 times earnings. For 2027, FactSet data show the consensus estimate rose from $1.59 in September to $3.71, which implies a multiple of 38.5.

The club acknowledged that SpaceX is more speculative than its typical holdings. Some of the forecasts require a leap of faith, notably SI revenue climbing from an estimated $26.7 billion in 2026 to $132 billion next year as more gigawatts come online. Still, the club said the stock looks attractively valued if the company delivers, and added that betting against Musk has been a fool's errand.