Starlink and Data Centers Drive William Blair’s Bullish SpaceX Call

Louie DiPalma framed William Blair’s bullish view of SpaceX around a simple formula: “Starlink plus Starship equals Starbucks.” The line was partly a reference to the prior Bloomberg segment on Starbucks, but the underlying claim was valuation-driven. DiPalma said William Blair had previously assigned a $300 billion valuation to SpaceX’s launch business, only a fraction of what he described as an approximately $2.2 trillion total company valuation. He said SpaceX went public at around $1.8 trillion or $1.9 trillion.

The larger value, in his telling, comes from Starlink and the data-center opportunity rather than from rockets alone. “Starlink and the data center business right now are what’s producing the Starbucks here,” DiPalma said, adding that Starlink has “taken over the entire telecom industry.”

Bloomberg’s on-screen graphics disclosed that DiPalma, his family, and William Blair did not own SpaceX stock, and showed SpaceX trading around $150 intraday, up roughly 1% during the segment. Another Bloomberg lower-third summarized William Blair’s upside case: “SpaceX shares could rise 40% in a year.”

DiPalma’s support for the Starlink thesis came from sectors William Blair has followed for years. He said the firm has covered satellite communications providers including Viasat, Iridium, Gogo, and AST SpaceMobile for the past decade, and argued that Starlink has won substantial customer share across in-flight connectivity and residential broadband. He also pointed to widely reported data-center leases with Anthropic and Google as evidence that SpaceX is “firing on all cylinders,” before qualifying that to “nearly all cylinders.”

Ed Ludlow pressed the dependency in the thesis: future business lines such as orbital data centers, and ideas further out than that, depend on Starship working, becoming human-payload rated, and becoming reusable. Ludlow asked whether every Starship test launch would become a stock-moving event for sell-side analysts and investors.

DiPalma’s answer was that individual launches should be interpreted as part of an iterative engineering program rather than as binary verdicts on the equity. He said SpaceX had completed 12 Starship launches and expected a 13th, and that “every time they launch Starship, they learn something.” The goal, he said, is rapid and full reusability over the next several years, not over the next few months.

That timing matters to his stock view. Because he sees SpaceX as “a full decade ahead of the competition,” DiPalma said he does not expect the share price to be highly sensitive to each Starship trial. Bloomberg showed SpaceX-sourced launch footage during this discussion, including liftoff and stage-separation telemetry, underscoring that Starship’s technical progress is central to the debate even if DiPalma does not expect every test to dominate the stock.

The risk he identified as more equity-sensitive was commercial rather than launch-specific: if Google or Anthropic suggested they wanted to terminate their data-center leases with SpaceX. DiPalma said those leases involve “huge dollar volumes.” Ludlow inserted an important caveat: Elon Musk himself had suggested the leases were short term and had disputed their longer-term nature.

That exchange leaves the data-center piece in a more conditional place than the headline thesis might imply. DiPalma treats Anthropic and Google as material signals for SpaceX’s future business mix; Ludlow noted that Musk had already complicated the idea that those commitments should be read as durable long-term contracts.

Blue Origin’s fundraising, in DiPalma’s view, signals appetite for a serious competitor to SpaceX. But he argued that appetite does not erase the operating gap. He contrasted Blue Origin’s New Glenn with SpaceX’s Falcon 9: New Glenn had launched three times, he said, while Falcon 9 had launched more than 650 times.

DiPalma also said Blue Origin’s prior mission with AST SpaceMobile “didn’t work out very well.” By contrast, he described SpaceX as already working on Starship, which he called a generation ahead of New Glenn. He grouped Blue Origin and Rocket Lab as the “most competent and capable and innovative competitors” to SpaceX, but treated that as a relative endorsement within a market SpaceX still dominates.

His market-share claim was explicit: SpaceX has more than 90% share and is a decade ahead. From that, he drew a valuation conclusion: SpaceX’s launch business should be worth more than triple the rest of the market combined.

That is a strong version of the scarcity argument. The existence of competitors may validate the market, and Blue Origin’s access to capital may lift expectations for the sector, but DiPalma’s framework still assigns SpaceX the overwhelming share of value because it has already demonstrated operational cadence at scale.

Ludlow closed by asking how William Blair models Elon Musk “key man risk.” DiPalma rejected the framing as one-sided. He called Musk a “double-edged sword,” but argued that he is also the company’s “key man virtue.”

DiPalma described Musk as “the greatest innovator of this century” and said William Blair views him as highly aligned with SpaceX. He cited Musk sleeping on the floor at Starbase and putting his “heart and soul” into his businesses as reasons the firm does not consider him a major risk in this case.

The answer did not depend only on Musk. DiPalma also pointed to SpaceX’s management bench, naming Gwynne Shotwell, Mike Lacouso, and CFO Bret Johnsen, whom he called “awesome.” He said William Blair met the team at Starbase and in Hawthorne, and came away viewing the bench as deep.

The resulting treatment of Musk is not that founder dependence is irrelevant. It is that, for DiPalma, Musk’s involvement is part of the bull case, and the management team reduces the need to apply a large key-person discount.