{"id":7464,"date":"2026-06-15T20:58:34","date_gmt":"2026-06-15T20:58:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/?p=7464"},"modified":"2026-06-15T20:58:34","modified_gmt":"2026-06-15T20:58:34","slug":"top-analyst-71-of-spacexs-2-trillion-value-rests-on-ai-groks-actual-numbers-almost-comical","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/?p=7464","title":{"rendered":"Top analyst: 71% of SpaceX&#8217;s $2 trillion value rests on AI. Grok&#8217;s actual numbers \u2018almost comical\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/fortune.com\/img-assets\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/GettyImages-2280063849-e1781552979196.jpg?w=2048\" \/><\/p>\n<p>SpaceX\u2019s $1.77 trillion IPO was, by any measure, historic. Whether it was justified is a different question. <\/p>\n<div>\n<p>Keith Snyder, a senior equities analyst at the Center for Financial Research and Analysis, says he can only match SpaceX\u2019s current $2 trillion market cap by factoring in \u201calmost comical growth for AI\u201d \u2014 and still falling short. His estimate: xAI accounts for 71% of SpaceX\u2019s valuation. \u201cI hope most investors did not give that number weight,\u201d he said of the S1\u2019s AI projections.<\/p>\n<p>To be sure, one part of SpaceX\u2019s rocket and satellite business is profitable and dominant \u2014 Starlink counts millions of paying subscribers globally, and bulls argue that xAI is early-stage, Grok\u2019s integration into X gives it a distribution edge and enterprise adoption curves for AI products can inflect sharply. SpaceX did not respond to Fortune\u2019s request for comment.<\/p>\n<p>The S1 gave investors something to dream on: SpaceX claimed 93% of its total addressable market would be \u201cin AI\u201d \u2014 a figure roughly equivalent to U.S. annual GDP, or $26.5 trillion. \u201cThis is an Elon Musk company, so Elon Musk numbers are wildly optimistic,\u201d Snyder told <em>Fortune<\/em>, \u201cand so the TAM number that they came out with, I have absolutely no idea how they arrived at.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>To Snyder\u2019s point, SpaceX explicitly argued in its S1 filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission: <strong>\u201c<\/strong>We believe we have identified the largest TAM in human history.\u201d The company estimated $28.5 trillion in quantifiable TAM, of which $26.5 trillion was allocated for AI, \u201cacross $2.4 trillion in AI infrastructure, $760 billion in consumer subscriptions, $600 billion in digital advertising, and $22.7 trillion in enterprise applications.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The current data offers little comfort for that optimism. Of the 117 million people who currently interact with Grok via its freemium model, just 1.6% pay for the premium tier (1.9 million SuperGrok, SuperGrok Heavy and SuperGrok Lite paid subscribers). That compares to roughly 5% who paid users for ChatGPT in 2025. New data from AI adoption tracker Ramp shows xAI at just 3% business adoption, against Anthropic and OpenAI \u2014 both at 40%.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThe issue is if those users are not adopting Grok every on a weekly basis, or ideally a daily basis, and for sticky high-value use cases, they\u2019re probably never going to pay for Grok,\u201d Kyle Poyar, a former operating partner at venture capital firm OpenView, told <em>Fortune<\/em>. Poyar, who has expertise in AI monetization and product-led growth, mentioned Anthropic as an example of an AI company making itself indispensable by \u201cgoing into much deeper, stickier use cases\u201d and using their free offering as an \u201ceffective on-ramp.\u201d<\/p>\n<p><!--$--><\/p>\n<p><iframe class=\"w-full\" height=\"499\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/datawrapper.dwcdn.net\/HgJy1\/1\/\" title=\"xAI's adoption rate is more than 13 times lower than primary competitors\" width=\"0\" aria-label=\"Line chart\" id=\"datawrapper-chart-HgJy1\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"0\" data-external=\"1\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p><!--\/$--><\/p>\n<p>Poyar explained that AI companies are increasingly framing covering the costs of tokens for users as a marketing expense to draw in more profitable customers. Instead of spending money on ads, Anthropic and OpenAI spend money on compute for free users and \u201cit\u2019s going to accomplish the same thing\u201d in acquiring paid customers and ideally enterprise ones, according to Poyar.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cI do think that strategy is working for Anthropic,\u201d Poyar said. \u201cIt\u2019s not clear to me that that\u2019s working as well for xAI.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Snyder said that while Grok is still in its early stage compared to other AI models, its status as a \u201cglorified Amazon Web Services\u201d that rents out excess computing power to Google and Anthropic is a concern if it can\u2019t evolve its own model to compete.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThey\u2019re behind Open AI and Anthropic, in my opinion, in terms of the complexity and the sophistication of the model itself, and so I think that is also reflected in that 1.6% number,\u201d Snyder said. \u201cIt\u2019s that other people can do everything better right now, and so there aren\u2019t a lot of incentives to sign just with Grok when you know the other companies have better stuff available and out in the market.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>There\u2019s also a limit to how long companies can cover token costs before losing out on converting customers, according to Vineet Kumar, a professor at Purdue University\u2019s Mitch Daniels School of Business known for his freemium model research.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cIf a firm is more generous with their free offering, more users would sign up to use the service in the first place,\u201d Kumar said. \u201cBut if it is too generous, then users have less reason to upgrade to the premium plan.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Evan Bailyn, whose company First Page Sage tracks and publishes B2B conversion rates across industries, said that unlike Spotify \u2013 which enjoys high conversation rates because it is \u201cintegral to the way people exercise and socialize and relax\u201d \u2013 Grok is more of a \u201cnice to have\u201d to add onto X with no real \u201cincentive to be premium.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>As a result, Bailyn doesn\u2019t expect Grok to become a \u201cfront-runner\u201d in the enterprise AI race.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>\u201cOpenAI, Google Gemini and Anthropic just have pretty much all the enterprise market share, so they have to really, really climb there,\u201d Bailyn said.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p>#Top #analyst #SpaceXs #trillion #rests #Groks #actual #numbers #comical<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>SpaceX\u2019s $1.77 trillion IPO was, by any measure, historic. Whether it was justified is a different question. Keith Snyder, a senior equities analyst at the Center for Financial Research and&hellip; <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":7465,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[7706,4810,536,9749,9748,2400,4052,735,9747,1843,5557,187,771],"class_list":["post-7464","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-finance-news","tag-actual","tag-analyst","tag-anthropic","tag-comical","tag-groks","tag-ipos","tag-numbers","tag-openai","tag-rests","tag-spacex","tag-spacexs","tag-top","tag-trillion"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7464","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7464"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7464\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/7465"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7464"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7464"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7464"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}