Ben Pouladian

OpenAI, Anthropic, and SpaceX are not being priced like companies. They are being priced like scarce control points. SpaceX is the first one headed for a public tape.

Scarcity Is the Asset.

“Weekends are for philosophy.”

Ram Ahluwalia had the right line for the moment.

The SpaceX discourse this week is mostly about the multiple.

The $2 trillion implied valuation. The hundreds-of-x sales multiple. The obvious-bubble framing.

The complaint is reasonable. It is also pointed at the wrong artifact.

Friends and subscribers have been asking me the same question all week: do I buy the SpaceX IPO, or is this the top? I know several early investors who are quietly relieved to finally get liquidity after a decade-plus hold. I am on the fence personally. What follows is the framework I am using to sort it.

The Tell

SpaceX filed hundreds of pages.

It talked about Mars.

It talked about AI.

It talked about a $28.5 trillion TAM.

What it did not talk about was the thing that may matter most: power.

That is the tell.

Ed Ludlow surfaced it yesterday on X, sourced from Bloomberg’s Kara Carlson and Mark Chediak. SpaceX is building a 10 gigawatt solar manufacturing facility in Bastrop, Texas. 1.1 million square feet across two floors at 5 GW per floor. Bloomberg frames the purpose plainly: power for the next generation of Starlink satellites, and power for the orbital data centers Elon Musk has been describing publicly for two years. A billion-plus-dollar industrial program. The S-1 names Bastrop and says SpaceX will more than double the facility in 2026 to add Starlink gateway antennas, solar cells, and AI compute satellites. The 10 GW scale is not in the filing.

The disclosure layer is selling Mars and AI. The construction layer is buying power.

What the Multiple Bears Are Missing

The obvious critique is that SPCX does not screen on sales. That is true and not interesting.

The better question is why the market is willing to suspend the screen.

The answer is control. SpaceX is not being valued as Starlink plus rockets. It is being valued as a vertically integrated stack: launch, orbit, broadband distribution, AI compute, power manufacturing, and eventually orbital data center optionality.

The multiple looks insane if the asset is Starlink revenue. It looks less insane if the asset is the only credible path from ground power to orbital compute.

That is the read.

Scarcity Is the Asset

The combined post-money on OpenAI, Anthropic, and SpaceX is about $4 trillion. The combined annualized revenue is about $80 billion. The implied multiple is roughly 50x sales.

That number is not a DCF output. It is the price of control. A scarce asset is not priced like a factory. It is priced like a unique control point. One OpenAI. One Anthropic. One SpaceX.

Each of the three privates controls something the market has decided cannot be easily replicated:

• OpenAI: frontier capability and consumer distribution.

• Anthropic: enterprise trust and model quality at the agentic edge.

• SpaceX: orbital coverage, launch capacity, and now power.

Run the three numbers.

OpenAI: $852B post-money on a $24B run rate, ~35x sales. The $122B raise closed March 31, 2026. Q1 2026 revenue at $5.7B, annualizing to $24B. Mix is 45% ChatGPT consumer, 35% enterprise API, 20% platform and Microsoft licensing. Enterprise revenue is on track to parity with consumer by year-end.

Anthropic: $900B-plus pre-money in talks on a $43B run rate, ~21x sales. The Series G closed at $380B post on February 12. A new round is in discussion as of late April at $40 to $50B raised on $900B-plus pre-money, per TechCrunch. The April 2026 annualized run rate is $43B, up from $9B at the end of 2025. That is 4.8x in four months. The 1,000-plus $1M-plus customers doubled in under two months.

SpaceX: $2 trillion implied on roughly $18B Starlink run rate, more than 100x. Starlink is more than two thirds of revenue and printed $1.2B of profit last quarter. At the implied $2T equity value, Starlink alone underwrites a multiple north of 100x. And the 10 GW Bastrop scale is not in the S-1.

The honest read on SpaceX: I am on the fence about when orbital data centers actually scale. Maybe 2028. Maybe 2032. Maybe never at the scale being implied. But the timing is not what is repricing the equity. The AI narrative is. SpaceX is going public as the only private company with a credible story across launch, satellites, AI compute, and power. The IPO pop is being underwritten by that narrative, not by the discounted cash flow of orbital data centers.

Anthropic is growing fastest and pricing cheapest. SpaceX is growing slowest on the revenue line and pricing richest. In any normal sales-multiple framework, the faster-growing name carries the higher multiple. None of these three behave that way.

The multiple is not tracking growth. It is tracking what each company controls that nobody else can easily replicate.

Below the divider: the rack-power roadmap, the public-market overflow map, the six-name action framework across power, optics, foundry, and connectivity, and the six S-1 reads that decide whether SPCX is a scarcity asset or a public-market comp trap.

BE, LITE, COHR, TSEM, CRDO, ALAB, plus SPCX itself.