When should I buy SpaceX???

Should I buy SpaceX now? It’s down to $108.

Should I buy SpaceX now? It’s up to $140.

How about now???

I receive some version of this question almost every day.

Surprisingly, my answer really isn’t about SpaceX.

It's about you.

More specifically, it's about what game you're playing.

Everybody Is Playing a Different Game

One of my favorite investing concepts comes from Morgan Housel's The Psychology of Money.

He argues that one of the biggest mistakes investors make is assuming there's one "correct" price for a stock.

There isn't.

The right price depends entirely on what game you're playing.

Imagine three people looking at shares of SpaceX today.

• The first plans to own it for the next 30 years.

• The second plans to own it for the next 5 years.

• The third plans to buy and sell it today.

They're all looking at the exact same company.

Yet each one has very different reasons for owning it.

The 30-year investor is thinking big picture.

He’s thinking of the possibilities of space travel and the eventual colonization of Mars.

A quarterly earnings miss or a 20% correction won't change his mind.

The 5-year investor has very different priorities.

He’s looking at near-term launch execution, AI spending, and whether SpaceX can continue turning ambitious projects into profitable businesses.

Then there's the day trader.

He isn't trying to predict where SpaceX will be in 5 to 30 years.

He's trying to make money before dinner.

At that point, price doesn’t matter.

He just needs the stock to move in the right direction over the next few minutes or hours.

This is what makes a market.

And it’s why one investor can say, "SpaceX is ridiculously expensive," while another says, "I can't believe it's this cheap."

They're not necessarily disagreeing.

They're just playing different games.

The Game I'm Playing

I don't currently own shares of SpaceX.

But I expect that to change.

When it does, I'll be playing the 30-year game.

My reasoning is simple.

At a $2 trillion valuation on expected revenue of about $45 billion this year, SpaceX is incredibly expensive.

On top of that, the IPO lockup schedule is only just beginning.

And history shows that newly public companies often experience additional selling as employees and early investors become free to cash out.

For investors focused on the next few years, I'd probably look elsewhere.

Companies like Nvidia, Amazon, and Alphabet are already generating enormous cash flows from AI and, in my opinion, offer a better risk-reward profile over that timeframe.

But the long term is a different story.

Over the long term, I’m interested in what eventually SpaceX could be.

Today, we're still in the very early innings of the space economy.

SpaceX launches rockets, operates Starlink, and spends heavily on AI.

But in 2050, the company could be:

• Building data centers in space

• Mining asteroids for rare minerals

• Transporting cargo between planets

• Even establishing the first permanent colony on Mars.

It sounds like science fiction.

Then again, so did landing and reusing rockets.

But this is what excites me about SpaceX.

I'm not trying to predict what the company earns next quarter.

I'm trying to imagine what the company could become over the next 30 years.

So when readers ask me, "Should I buy SpaceX today?" my answer is usually another question:

What game are you playing?

If you're trying to make money over the next few months or years, my answer may be very different than if you're trying to own one of the defining companies of the next generation.