The Rule of X, a valuation rule of thumb from Bessemer Venture Partners, links a company’s revenue multiple to its growth and its EBITDA margin, a measure of operating profit. Dealroom scores 160 public technology companies on it, with growth counted three times as heavily as margins. The chart opens on B2B companies with the worst-fitting outliers excluded from the trend line but still shown, faded; the controls put them back into the fit.

SpaceX listed on Nasdaq in June 2026, so it is plotted at its traded multiple — about 26× forward revenue — and counts toward the trend line like any other public company. OpenAI and Anthropic are still private: the chart opens on their expected-IPO marks, with a toggle back to their last priced rounds, and they never move the line.

The revenue race

OpenAI said monthly revenue had reached $2 billion in March 2026. This equals a $24 billion annual run-rate. Anthropic said its revenue run-rate had passed $47 billion in May. By the end of July, Bloomberg put OpenAI above $40 billion, and Dealroom’s tracked estimate for Anthropic reached $74.3 billion.

The figures are not directly comparable. Both turn recent activity into an annual number. Anthropic also includes the full amount that customers spend through cloud providers in its revenue. It then records the cloud provider’s share as a cost. A company using net accounting would report only its own share as revenue. This makes Anthropic’s reported revenue higher, even when the underlying business is the same size.

Claude Code, launched in May 2025, changed Anthropic’s growth rate. The product reached $1 billion of annualized revenue in November 2025, passed a confirmed $2.5 billion in February 2026 and was estimated near $8 billion by May. Anthropic added about $23 billion of annualized revenue in June alone. OpenAI re-accelerated after a slower spring, adding about $4 billion a month from May to July, but the gap continued to widen.

At a $2 trillion expected IPO valuation in October 2026, Anthropic is valued at 21.1× its gross revenue for the next 12 months. On the net-revenue basis SpaceX and OpenAI report, the multiple is 28.8×.

The chart uses full-year revenue, not the latest annual run-rate. That distinction matters most for SpaceX: Deutsche Bank’s model has it reaching a $100 billion annualised run-rate in December 2026, versus the $31 billion pace reported in Q2. A December run-rate is not the same as $100 billion booked during 2026, but it makes our previous $62–98 billion range for full-year 2027 look too conservative.

We have reset the SpaceX range accordingly. The midpoint now assumes $45 billion in 2026, $140 billion in 2027 and $220 billion in 2028. The main driver is not rockets or connectivity but the emerging neocloud business: Deutsche Bank expects AI-compute contracts to contribute roughly $45–50 billion of the December 2026 run-rate. This is still a capital-intensive forecast, with the bank estimating about $200 billion of investment next year.

SpaceX results and outlook

SpaceX’s first public quarter was strong. Revenue nearly doubled from a year earlier and the adjusted EBITDA margin reached 45%. Starlink subscribers also doubled. New AI infrastructure contracts added another large source of growth.

The company did not publish a formal full-year revenue or profit forecast. But it says it can exit 2026 at a $100 billion annualised revenue run-rate. Deutsche Bank expects roughly $45–50 billion of that pace to come from AI-compute contracts. That makes neocloud, rather than launches or connectivity, the major new growth engine.

Dealroom now estimates that booked revenue will rise from $45 billion in 2026 to $220 billion in 2028. If SpaceX delivers this growth while keeping high margins, its current valuation becomes easier to support. But the forecast requires exceptional execution and capital: Deutsche Bank estimates roughly $200 billion of investment next year.

This is the main point of the Rule of X comparison. SpaceX looks close to other fast-growing public technology companies when we use Dealroom’s forward revenue estimate. It looks expensive when we use only revenue already reported. The valuation depends on how much of the expected growth becomes real revenue.

Valuation by business

The Rule of X treats SpaceX as one company. A sum-of-the-parts view separates Starlink, AI infrastructure, xAI and the remaining space and launch business.

Starlink revenue potential

Starlink’s annual revenue is about $11.4 billion. In 2025, Verizon had $138.2 billion of revenue, AT&T had $125.6 billion and T-Mobile US had $88.3 billion. These companies are not direct comparisons, but they show how large a global connectivity business can become. Direct-to-cell services and rising data use from AI and robots could make Starlink’s market much larger.