Analyst says AI underpins most of SpaceX’s $2 trillion valuation

SpaceX’s valuation has reached $2 trillion after a $1.77 trillion IPO, and one analyst says most of that price depends on the company’s AI ambitions. Keith Snyder, a senior equities analyst at the Center for Financial Research and Analysis, told Fortune that his model attributes 71% of SpaceX’s value to xAI.

Snyder said he could not justify the current market value without making highly aggressive assumptions about AI growth. Fortune reported that SpaceX did not respond to a request for comment.

AI assumptions carry much of the valuation

SpaceX’s S-1 filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission put a large share of its market opportunity in artificial intelligence, according to Fortune. The filing estimated $28.5 trillion in measurable total addressable market, with $26.5 trillion tied to AI.

That AI figure included $2.4 trillion for infrastructure, $760 billion for consumer subscriptions, $600 billion for digital advertising and $22.7 trillion for enterprise applications, according to the filing cited by Fortune. SpaceX said in the filing that it believed it had identified the largest total addressable market in history.

Snyder told Fortune he did not know how SpaceX arrived at that market-size estimate and said the projections should not carry much weight for investors. The critique focuses on whether Grok, xAI’s chatbot, can turn usage into paying customers at the scale implied by the company’s AI forecast.

SpaceX’s traditional space business gives investors a clearer base, Fortune reported. Starlink has millions of paying customers around the world, and supporters of the stock argue that Grok is still young, can benefit from distribution through X and could gain enterprise customers quickly if adoption accelerates.

Grok trails larger AI rivals

Fortune reported that Grok has 117 million users interacting with the product through a freemium model. Of that group, 1.9 million users, or 1.6%, pay for SuperGrok, SuperGrok Heavy or SuperGrok Lite.

By comparison, Fortune reported that about 5% of ChatGPT users paid for the product in 2025. Data from Ramp’s AI Index cited by Fortune showed xAI with 3% business adoption, while OpenAI and Anthropic each had 40%; Google’s adoption rate was twice xAI’s, according to Fortune.

Kyle Poyar, a former operating partner at OpenView who focuses on AI monetization and product-led growth, told Fortune that Grok needs users to return frequently for valuable work if it is to convert them into paying subscribers. He said Anthropic has been more successful at using free access as a path toward paid and enterprise use.

Poyar also told Fortune that AI companies are treating the cost of serving free users as a marketing expense. In his view, OpenAI and Anthropic are using compute spending to attract customers who may later pay, while xAI has not shown the same evidence of conversion.

Snyder told Fortune that Grok remains behind OpenAI and Anthropic in model sophistication, in his opinion. He also said xAI risks being seen as more of a provider of excess computing capacity to companies such as Google and Anthropic if its own model does not close the gap.

Vineet Kumar, a professor at Purdue University’s Mitch Daniels School of Business who studies freemium models, told Fortune that free tiers can attract users but may also reduce the need to upgrade if they offer too much. Evan Bailyn, whose firm First Page Sage tracks B2B conversion rates, told Fortune that Grok appears less essential than products with stronger everyday use cases and said OpenAI, Google Gemini and Anthropic already hold much of the enterprise AI market.

This story draws on original reporting from Fortune.