Apple Just Hit $5 Trillion. Its “Biggest Competition” Is a SpaceX Phone, Says Gene Munster Bobby Sankhagowit Tue, November 10, 2026 at 12:39 PM EST 5 min read AAPL -0.55% SPCX -0.36% QCOM +0.15% Explore stocks on Coinbase Trading disclosure Trading disclosure The above button links to Coinbase. Yahoo Finance is not a broker-dealer or investment adviser and does not offer securities or cryptocurrencies for sale or facilitate trading. Coinbase pays us for certain activity generated through this link. Prices displayed are informational.
Apple closed above $350 for the first time on Monday, which took its market value back above $5 trillion.
Gene Munster says Apple's biggest competition is a SpaceX phone that Elon Musk has called "utterly false," and SpaceX is already building a nationwide 5G network with Qualcomm.
Apple trades at 37x forward earnings, near the top of its 10-year range, while analysts expect its revenue growth to slow to about 6% by fiscal 2029.
A SpaceX phone looks years away from hurting the iPhone, so Apple's own valuation is the bigger risk to the stock right now.
Apple (AAPL:NASDAQ) closed at a record $350.69 on Monday, its first close above $350, putting its market value back above $5 trillion.
Gene Munster, managing partner at Deepwater Asset Management, is about as bullish on Apple as anyone. On the latest episode of the RiskReversal Pod, he said "Apple's in an amazing place" and predicted a hardware supercycle over the next decade.
Then he named the competitor he's watching, and officially it doesn't exist. In early July, The Wall Street Journal reported that SpaceX (SPCX:NASDAQ) had shown investors a prototype handset that was slimmer than an iPhone and ran its own AI-powered operating system. Elon Musk's reply on X: "Utterly false."
"I think that their biggest competition is this SpaceX phone that [Elon] says is utterly false. I think it's utterly true."
Which is quite a call to make about the world's most valuable company.
TIKR tracks 45 analysts on Apple. How many say "Buy"?
See the full breakdown of Buy, Hold, and Sell ratings on Apple, along with Wall Street's revenue and earnings estimates, all in one place. More than 500,000 investors use TIKR to research stocks like this one. See Apple's Analyst Ratings
Until now, SpaceX's push into wireless has been read as bad news for the carriers. Jim Cramer went as far as saying "You should not own AT&T."
But the network itself is real. On Qualcomm's (QCOM) fiscal fourth-quarter call on Nov. 4, CEO Cristiano Amon said "SpaceX selected Qualcomm to power Starlink Mobile's nationwide terrestrial 5G network in the U.S." Deployment starts in 2027 under a multiyear deal, and Amon expects it to be one of the largest 5G deployments in the country.
A network needs phones, which is where Munster's warning comes in. Apple has already been asked about it. On Apple's July earnings call, John Ternus, now its CEO, answered a question about AI devices from OpenAI and SpaceX by saying Apple is "really focused on our plans."
My read: a carrier with its own phone would have every reason to push it over an iPhone. And carriers and other resellers handled 60% of Apple's sales in fiscal 2025.
The iPhone brought in 50.4% of Apple's $416.2 billion of revenue in fiscal 2025. Munster's bull case leans on it even harder from here. He expects Apple's revenue to grow about 10% a year on average through 2030, much faster than over the past several years, with hardware outgrowing services. As a result, he sees services slipping back to 20% to 25% of revenue over the next few years.
Wall Street is more cautious. Analysts expect revenue to grow 10% in fiscal 2027, to $527 billion, then slow to about 6% by fiscal 2029:
That works out to about 8% a year from fiscal 2026 to fiscal 2029, below Munster's pace.
Investors are paying for the faster version anyway. Apple trades at 37x forward earnings, just under the 38x peak it hit on Oct. 22 and well above its 10-year average of 24x:
At that price, there isn't much room for anything that slows the iPhone, SpaceX included.
Munster also made the best case for why a rival phone would struggle. "We are connected to these products in a deep way," he said, and Apple's ecosystem is "very hard to get out of."
That ecosystem is also where Apple earns its fattest margins. Services made up 26.2% of fiscal 2025 revenue but 42.2% of gross profit, at a 75.4% gross margin, across more than 2.5 billion active devices. That mix helps explain why Apple's gross margin climbed from 43.3% in fiscal 2022 to 48.8% in fiscal 2026:
That margin is set to slip, though: Apple guided to 45% to 46% for the December quarter as memory costs climb.
So a SpaceX phone would cost Apple more than the hardware sale. A buyer who leaves the iPhone takes their App Store spending, iCloud storage and subscriptions along.
Still, I don't see a SpaceX phone hurting the iPhone anytime soon. There's no product to judge yet, and Starlink Mobile's network doesn't start going up until 2027. The nearer risk for Apple stock is its own price. At 37x forward earnings, it's priced closer to Munster's 10% growth than to the Street's slower forecast, so even a soft iPhone quarter could hurt.
Apple's December-quarter results, due in late January, are the next test. And if SpaceX ever does put a phone on stage, with its own network behind it, I'd take Munster's warning far more seriously.
TIKR lets you forecast the future price of any stock in less than a minute. Just enter a few assumptions into TIKR's valuation model and see what Apple could be worth. Start from Wall Street consensus estimates, or adjust the inputs to reflect your own view of the business. It's free to use.
