Prediction: SpaceX Will Get “Cut in Half Over the Next 6 Months,” Here’s Why

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SpaceX (Nasdaq: SPCX) finally hit the public markets, and within hours of the opening bell, the loudest voices on the Prof G Markets podcast were already calling the top. Co-host Ed Elson made the specific call that the stock will get “cut in half over the next 6 months” as the post-IPO hype fades. Scott Galloway, his co-host, framed the entire debut as a structural illusion engineered to create what he termed “the greatest and most scaled example of manufactured scarcity” the market has ever seen.

Here is what they argued, why it matters for satellite and launch competitors, and where the secondary fallout is already showing up in prices.

The Mechanics of the Pop

SpaceX priced at $135, opened at $150 (an 11% jump), and traded into the $160 to $165 range. Its second day of trading, the stock jumped another 19%, and is trading near $195 per share today. That run pushed Elon Musk’s net worth past $1 trillion, making him the world’s first trillionaire on paper.

Galloway’s thesis is that the pop was engineered. He pointed to three structural levers: NASDAQ waived its 12-month index-inclusion requirement under pressure from Musk; only 5% of shares were issued instead of the traditional 10%; and $3.75 billion in shares were reserved for friends and family with no lockup. He compared the setup to Hermès deliberately creating lines outside its stores and warned holders to treat the position as a trade rather than an investment because lockup expirations will trigger heavy selling.

There is also a soft retail constraint: brokerage apps allow selling but threaten to ban users from future IPOs if they do. That keeps weak hands in the trade until the formal unlock arrives. Lockup mechanics like this, including hedging, swap, and synthetic-security restrictions, are standard in modern IPO underwriting agreements as documented across recent IPO listings.

Elson’s Valuation Math

Elson built the bear case off the multiple. At a $2.1 trillion valuation (it’s worth noting that since the Podcast was released, SpaceX’s valuation has risen to $2.6 trillion), SpaceX trades at 112 times last year’s sales. For comparison, he cited Meta at 28x and Google at 10x at their IPOs. The growth gap makes the spread harder to justify: SpaceX grew revenue 33% last year, against Meta’s 88% and Google’s 240% at their respective debuts.

The Competitor Reaction

Capital had to come from somewhere. On the day, Rocket Lab fell 10%, EchoStar fell 12%, and AST SpaceMobile fell 14%, consistent with investors rotating out of public proxies to fund SpaceX allocations.

Rocket Lab

Rocket Lab (NASDAQ:RKLB) is still up 294.09% over one year and carries a $2.20 billion backlog after Q1 FY26 revenue of $200.35 million, up 63.5% year over year, per its most recent 8-K. The stock changes hands near 100x sales, which makes it sensitive to any reset in space-sector multiples following the SpaceX debut.

EchoStar

EchoStar (NASDAQ:SATS) traded at $134 per share right before SpaceX’s IPO day. It has since fallen to $114 per share. The spectrum holder still sits on $14.8 billion in trailing revenue with a forward P/E of 2x, a deep-value setup that contrasts with SpaceX’s 112x revenue multiple.

AST SpaceMobile

AST SpaceMobile (NASDAQ:ASTS) competes directly with Starlink Direct to Cell. Q1 FY26 revenue of $14.74 million missed the $36.58 million consensus, and shares trade at 400x sales. That makes ASTS the most reflexive of the three: if Elson’s call lands and the SpaceX multiple compresses, the read-through to ASTS valuation is direct.

What to Watch

The next six months come down to one calendar: lockup expirations. If Galloway is right that $3.75 billion in unrestricted friends-and-family stock starts hitting the market, and the broader insider lockup follows, the float expands quickly. That is the mechanism Elson is pricing into his cut-in-half call. For RKLB, SATS, and ASTS holders, the second-order question is whether a SpaceX repricing drags the entire public space complex lower, or whether capital rotates back into the listed proxies once the IPO trade is over.

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