Jim Cramer has bold new take on Elon Musk's SpaceX IPO

There is always one IPO that defines a generation of investors.

For people who started buying stocks in the 1990s, it was Microsoft (MSFT) and Amazon (AMZN). For millennials, it was Facebook and Tesla (TSLA). Each one arrived with the same problem, a valuation that looked impossible right up until it didn't.

Elon Musk's SpaceX, which has spent nearly a decade as the most-anticipated private company in the world, is about to test the next generation of buyers.

SpaceX filed its IPO prospectus on May 20 and is targeting a June 12 debut on the Nasdaq under the ticker SPCX, with a reported valuation range of $1.75 trillion to $2 trillion, according to Investing.com.

That would make it the largest initial public offering in history by a wide margin, eclipsing Saudi Aramco's 2019 listing.

Even Jim Cramer is not sure the math gets there. The longtime CNBC host gave a blunt assessment of where the price sits right now, and three reasons it might not matter.

What Cramer told Mad Money viewers about SpaceX

Cramer addressed the SpaceX deal during the May 26 episode of CNBC's "Mad Money," and his opening line set the tone for the entire segment.

"Purely from the numbers, it's very difficult to justify giving SpaceX a $2 trillion valuation," Cramer said, according to CNBC.

He had reason to be cautious. The numbers themselves are extraordinary in both directions.

SpaceX generated $18.7 billion in revenue in 2025, up 33% year over year, but losses ballooned from a profit of $791 million in 2024 to a net loss of $4.94 billion last year, per the company's IPO prospectus.

The bulk of that bleeding came from one place. Out of nearly $21 billion in capital spending last year, $12.7 billion went to building data centers for the xAI division Musk merged into SpaceX in February.

When I ran the implied valuation against trailing revenue, the math came out to roughly 110 times sales, higher than Tesla's multiple at its 2010 IPO, per Investing.com.

That is the number Cramer kept circling back to. In my view, it is also the number that has every Wall Street strategist trying to figure out whether SPCX is the next Nvidia (NVDA) or the next WeWork.

Three catalysts that could rewrite the SpaceX bull case

The Mad Money host did not stop at the caution. He laid out three near-term events that, in his view, could make the price tag look reasonable in hindsight.