by Rod D. Martin
June 11, 2026
Fourteen years ago, almost to the week, Facebook stumbled out of the gate.
It debuted at $38. It briefly touched $45. Then it fell, and the press behaved exactly as the press always behaves when an extraordinary company fails to provide ordinary investors with an instant casino payout.
They called it overvalued. They mocked Mark Zuckerberg (and Peter Thiel). They said Facebook would never monetize. They treated the IPO as a failure because the people who actually built the company did not leave half their money on the table for CNBC’s favored traders.
I called Facebook a Strong Buy. If you listened, you made a LOT of money.
Not because I knew the bottom. I didn’t. I said at the time it might get worse before it got better. It did. I said the noise might continue for months. It did.
But none of that mattered, because the market was asking the wrong question.
The question was not whether Facebook would trade down from its IPO price. The question was whether Facebook already dominated the social graph, and whether that dominance would eventually monetize at a scale the critics refused to imagine.
It did. Spectacularly. Of course.
Now SpaceX is about to go public, and a lot of the same people are making the same type of mistake. Except this time the mistake is bigger. Much, much bigger.
Facebook organized the social graph. SpaceX is organizing the economic graph, of a new terrestrial economy, a new geopolitical reality, and of a multiplanetary human future.
SpaceX is the company that moves mass from Earth into orbit at unmatched scale and about 5 percent of the cost, that is building Starship to make that movement radically cheaper, that connects the planet through Starlink, that is creating AI infrastructure even its competitors need (and pay for), with orbital data centers, lunar industry, Martian cities, and, on the horizon, new technologies and new markets that barely exist today.
That is exactly why Martin Capital is rating it a Strong Buy, at any price that presents itself. Whatever that number is, and whatever volatility it may undergo, there is no price available in the vaguely near future that isn’t a generational bargain.
SpaceX Is a Generational Opportunity
SpaceX is expected to go public on the NASDAQ under the ticker SPCX at $135 per share, raising around $75 billion at roughly a $1.75 trillion valuation. That makes it, by far, the largest IPO in history. It also makes the usual crowd faint.
If you are trying to flip shares on Friday afternoon, and many will, volatility will matter. If the market decides it’s priced to perfection, as Facebook was, it will leave little money on the table in the near term for the kind of lottery win many are looking for. I’m not predicting that. I’m just warning you it could happen.
