SPCX -1.35% NVDA +3.98% 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.
Even if you're willing to invest more in a single stock than most investors have available to put to work, a one-time investment in Space Exploration Technologies (NASDAQ: SPCX) stock today almost certainly won't grow over time into a position worth $1 million or more.
But it could very well still be a great wealth-building investment over the long term, and while the odds of it delivering great riches to retail investors are slim, such an outcome can't be ruled out entirely. So let's take a look at the math.
Missed Nvidia in 2009? This Rare Signal Is Flashing Again. In 2009, a "Double Down" signal flashed for a little-known chipmaker called Nvidia. For the first time in years, that same "Total Conviction" signal is flashing for a company 1/100th the size of Nvidia. Continue »
If you invested $5,000 in SpaceX shares now, you'd need a 200x gain for your investment to reach $1 million. For the company to deliver that, assuming that its total share count doesn't grow at all from here, its market cap would have to grow to $364 trillion. For reference, that's more than twice the value of all listed stocks in the world combined today, as the global stock market was valued at $151.9 trillion at the end of 2025.
If you opted to invest a larger amount, like $10,000, or spread your purchases out over time to reach that as your total investment, you'd still need a 100x gain to make $1 million or more from your SpaceX shares. And you'd likely need to hold your shares for a very long time, even with that size of initial investment. Over 20 years, to get that 100x would require the stock to grow at a torrid annualized rate of 25.9%.
Few growth stocks have been able to sustain paces like that for two decades. Starting from a megacap size, as SpaceX is, makes the task an even heavier lift.
For SpaceX, that kind of growth would require substantial long-term successes in new business areas that haven't even been conceptualized yet. Still, given the resources available to the company and its CEO, Elon Musk, one can't completely rule out such an unusual result.
The next five years look pretty promising from a wealth-building perspective, even if there's little chance of SpaceX making any retail investor rich on its own.
Its revenue in Q3 was up 161% year over year, reaching $14.6 billion, with $7.6 billion from its "super intelligence" (SI) segment. SI's revenue came primarily from new cloud services agreements, as the company is renting out a growing quantity of computing capacity to other companies. It was further boosted by revenues from AI coding assistant Cursor, which it acquired in August, and Grok, the artificial intelligence model built by its xAI unit. Starlink, its satellite broadband service (and a big part of the argument for buying SpaceX stock), grew its consumer subscriber base to 13.6 million, with more likely on the way in the coming quarters.
Over the next 15 to 20 years, Starship, SpaceX's reusable rocket, should enable it to deploy a large number of higher-bandwidth Starlink satellites and perhaps even some AI data center satellites. Musk claimed that the company has "a clear path to several hundred billion dollars a year in connectivity revenue." That may be a stretch given that the segment's Q3 2026 revenue of $5.2 billion works out to about $21 billion annualized, roughly a tenth of that target, but it's not unimaginable over the very long term and with an expanded set of service offerings.
In short, don't buy this stock hoping it will make you a millionaire. However, if you can tolerate the substantial risk of holding it, it might be worth building a small position to get exposure to SpaceX's upside on the chance that Musk and his boosters are proven correct over the long run.
Before you buy stock in Space Exploration Technologies, consider this:
The Motley Fool Stock Advisor analyst team just identified what they believe are the 10 best stocks for investors to buy now… and Space Exploration Technologies wasn't one of them. The 10 stocks that made the cut could produce monster returns in the coming years.
Consider when Netflix made this list on December 17, 2004... if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation, you'd have $341,157!* Or when Nvidia made this list on April 15, 2005... if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation, you'd have $1,037,753!*
Now, it's worth noting Stock Advisor's total average return is 834% — a market-crushing outperformance compared to 207% for the S&P 500. Don't miss the latest top 10 list, available with Stock Advisor, and join an investing community built by individual investors for individual investors.
*Stock Advisor returns as of November 11, 2026.
Alex Carchidi has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Space Exploration Technologies. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.
Is SpaceX a Millionaire-Maker Stock? was originally published by The Motley Fool
