SpaceX's IPO could reprice RKLB, ASTS and LUNR overnight

SpaceX is about to IPO at $1.75 trillion. Here's where the money actually flows.

SpaceX going public is the most anticipated IPO in a generation, and the number being thrown around, $1.75 trillion, is so large that most investors don't know what to do with it. So they'll do what they always do: buy the thing they recognize, watch it get crowded immediately, and miss the real opportunity sitting just off to the side.

The real opportunity is the re-rating. When SpaceX lists, institutional capital that has been locked out of the private space economy for years now has a reference point. A publicly traded orbital launch company, valued at $1.75 trillion, immediately asks a question of every other public company in the sector: if SpaceX is worth that, what are you worth?

Rocket Lab USA (NASDAQ:RKLB) is the first name you follow that logic to. It is the only other company in the world with an operational orbital launch vehicle, the Electron rocket, flying commercial missions now. It has launched over 60 times. Its larger Neutron rocket is in development and aimed squarely at the medium-lift market SpaceX currently dominates with Falcon 9. Right now RKLB trades at a fraction of what a SpaceX IPO implies for the sector. When institutions get their SpaceX allocation and want more space exposure, RKLB is the next most obvious call.

AST SpaceMobile (NASDAQ:ASTS) is a different kind of trade. SpaceX proved satellite broadband works at scale through Starlink. ASTS is building the next version: a network that connects directly to ordinary smartphones without any special hardware. No dish on your roof. Your existing phone. The company has commercial satellites in orbit now and carrier agreements with AT&T, Verizon, and Rakuten, among others. A SpaceX IPO doesn't just validate ASTS thematically. It validates the entire commercial satellite communication model and puts billions of institutional dollars on a hunt for the next one.

Intuitive Machines (NASDAQ:LUNR) is the supply chain angle. LUNR launches its lunar landers on SpaceX Falcon 9 rockets and holds NASA contracts worth billions under the Commercial Lunar Payload Services program. It is literally a SpaceX customer. When SpaceX goes public and its revenue gets scrutinized, LUNR shows up in the launch manifest. That kind of proximity to the IPO story gets noticed.

None of these are SpaceX. RKLB is losing money while building Neutron. ASTS is pre-revenue at scale and still proving its satellite constellation performs as promised. LUNR is early-stage and mission-dependent. All three carry genuine risk of going to zero if the key bets don't land.

But the SpaceX IPO, if it happens this year at anything close to that valuation, changes the reference frame for the entire sector overnight. The three names above are the most direct public beneficiaries of that repricing. The question isn't whether they're good businesses yet. It's whether the market will care about that distinction in the weeks after the biggest tech IPO in history.

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Quick Takes

Three more stories worth knowing about

Golden Dome is turning into a real procurement cycle

The Golden Dome missile defence program has moved from political announcement to actual contract discussions faster than most expected. The Pentagon is steering tens of billions toward interceptors, sensors, and command systems, and the names already inside the program architecture are Lockheed Martin (NYSE:LMT) and RTX (NYSE:RTX). Kratos Defense (NASDAQ:KTOS) is the asymmetric angle, building lower-cost autonomous systems and drones that fit the distributed-defence model the Pentagon increasingly favours. LMT and RTX are the safe institutional plays. KTOS is where the repricing is sharper if the program scales the way Washington is signalling.

OpenAI at $1 trillion validates a lot of smaller bets

OpenAI is reportedly doing $25 billion in annualized revenue with 900 million weekly active users. When it IPOs, probably at something close to $1 trillion, it sets a market cap benchmark for AI-native software that makes a lot of current valuations look cheap by comparison. SoundHound AI (NASDAQ:SOUN) is one of the purest public proxies for the AI application layer, specifically voice. UiPath (NYSE:PATH) is where enterprises actually deploy AI into production workflows today. An OpenAI IPO doesn't lift every AI stock equally, but it does force a re-examination of what AI-native software companies are worth at scale.

Credo Technology is quietly becoming the hyperscaler connectivity pick

Credo Technology Group (NASDAQ:CRDO) makes high-speed connectivity chips, specifically the active electrical cables and SerDes technology that moves data inside AI data centers. Its customers are hyperscalers and large OEMs. As AI training clusters scale from thousands to hundreds of thousands of GPUs, the internal networking connecting all those chips becomes the binding constraint, and Credo sits in the middle of solving it. Revenue has been growing fast. The stock doesn't get the same attention as Nvidia or Broadcom, but the underlying demand driver is identical. Score of 92 in our system puts it in the same tier as names three times its size.

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Overlooked Stock

KSPI

Joint Stock Company Kaspi.kz

Kaspi.kz (NASDAQ:KSPI) is a payments, marketplace, and fintech platform that does in Kazakhstan what Alipay does in China and what nobody has managed to replicate in most of the Western world: one app handles shopping, payments, lending, travel booking, and peer-to-peer transfers for the majority of a country's population. It has been expanding into Azerbaijan and Ukraine. Revenue and margins are both strong by any comparable standard. The stock trades at a significant discount to Western fintech peers, partly because Kazakhstan doesn't appear on most fund managers' approved markets list. That's the opportunity. The business is executing, the unit economics are clean, and the geography that looks like a risk to most investors is exactly the reason the valuation gap exists. Worth spending time with the IR filings before the market catches up.

The Contrarian Take

First Solar is the most mispriced energy stock in America right now

The consensus on First Solar (NASDAQ:FSLR) is that tariff uncertainty and the rollback of Inflation Reduction Act incentives have permanently clouded the setup. That's fair as far as it goes. What the consensus is missing is the manufacturing position. First Solar makes panels in Ohio and Arizona using a proprietary cadmium telluride thin-film process that is completely separate from the Chinese silicon supply chain. Every tariff that lands on Chinese solar imports makes First Solar's domestic production more competitive, not less. The IRA risk is real, but the tariff story runs in the opposite direction to the bear case. A score of 93 puts it at the top of our coverage universe. Most investors are treating it as a policy casualty. The manufacturing moat and the tariff tailwind together suggest the market has those two forces backwards.