Elon Musk’s rocket company has only just begun trading on public markets, yet investors are already asking how far it could climb. According to pricing in the options market, the path to the very top of the corporate ladder is possible, but it would likely take years rather than months.
SpaceX joined the stock market valued highly enough to slot in as the fifth-biggest listed company in the world. That puts it neck and neck with Amazon and comfortably ahead of Tesla, the electric carmaker also run by Mr Musk, by more than a trillion dollars. From there, though, the climb gets steeper. Sitting just above SpaceX on the leaderboard are Apple and Alphabet, Google’s parent company, both worth more than $4.4 trillion.
To leapfrog that pair and move into second place, behind only the chipmaker Nvidia, SpaceX’s stock would need to climb by roughly 70%, taking its share price to around $340, assuming Apple and Alphabet’s own values stay where they are. Traders who deal in options, contracts that let buyers bet on where a stock’s price is headed, currently put the odds of that happening at roughly fifty-fifty over the next couple of years, with most estimates pointing to the middle of 2028.
Working out exactly when a stock might hit a certain price from options pricing is not an exact science, since trading contracts are not available for every single month. Even so, contracts due to expire in June 2028 imply a chance of around 46% that SpaceX shares will have reached that level by then.
Climbing all the way to the very top spot, ahead of Nvidia itself, is a taller order again. Based on current options pricing, there is roughly a 38% chance of that happening by the middle of 2028, rising only slightly to about 41% by the end of that year. In other words, traders see it as plausible, but far from certain, and not something likely to happen quickly.
It is worth remembering what these numbers actually represent. Options prices are not predictions in the way a forecaster might offer one. They reflect how much traders are willing to pay for the right to buy or sell a stock at a particular price by a set date, and from those prices it is possible to work backwards to estimate what the market, collectively, thinks is likely. When a lot of money is changing hands in a particular direction, as has been the case with SpaceX since it began trading, it tends to push those implied odds higher.
There are obvious reasons why investors are excited. Going public came with the kind of attention few companies ever receive, along with a swift entry into derivatives trading and some of the most closely watched stock indexes in the world. Few businesses arrive on the market already worth several trillion dollars. But size alone does not guarantee a smooth climb up the rankings. Reaching each new level, from fifth place to fourth, then third, second and finally first, appears to take a meaningful chunk of time even for a company moving as quickly as SpaceX has been.
For now, the firm remains some way short of the very top. Nvidia continues to hold a clear lead, with Apple and Alphabet standing in between. Whether SpaceX eventually closes that gap will depend on factors well beyond what any options contract can capture, including its rocket launch schedule, the profitability of its Starlink satellite business, and broader sentiment towards Mr Musk’s other ventures. The market, for its part, is simply pricing in the possibility, one that traders currently see as roughly a coin flip over the next two years, and somewhat less likely sooner than that.
