SpaceX Launches Classified Payload for NRO from Cape Canaveral, Florida

A SpaceX Falcon 9 launches from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station on December 9, 2025 (Paul Hennesy/Getty Images)

to the moon

SpaceX is reportedly valued at around $800 billion ahead of slated 2026 IPO, sending Musk’s net worth soaring

The valuation figure’s more than doubled since July, and is now a much larger part of Elon Musk’s wealth than Tesla is.

12/17/25 7:08AM

Recently there’s been a hell of a lot of noise around Elon Musk’s rocket ship and satellite internet company, SpaceX, so much so that employees received an internal email informing them that the business is entering a “regulatory quiet period,” per Bloomberg reporting this morning.

SpaceX was founded in 2002 and has notched impressive firsts in the decades since, including being the first private company to send humans to the International Space Station five years ago. Now, workers are being asked to refrain from talking publicly about plans for a potential blockbuster IPO next year, the company’s growth, and its valuation.

Thanks to a mid-December insider tender offering, we have a good idea of just how much the latter has jumped in recent years.

SpaceX valuation chart 2025 — Sherwood News

Back in July of this year, the company was reportedly selling shares and raising money at a $400 billion valuation, a figure that’s doubled in the months since. In that period, SpaceX has continued its domination across the industry with more affordable space launches and exploration ambitions — per Forbes, the company “now launches more payload into orbit than the rest of the world combined.”

All of this is, obviously, pretty huge for Elon Musk, the SpaceX founder, CEO, and richest person on Earth, who also saw one of his other companies, Tesla, close at a record high yesterday for the first time in almost exactly a year. Indeed, his 42% stake in the $800 billion SpaceX business means that the majority of his reported $648 billion net worth — on paper, as we first noted in February — comes from what had once been a bit of a side hustle alongside his booming EV business.

Matt Phillips10m

Intel soars amid retail engagement, analyst chatter

Intel ripped toward a new 52-week high Wednesday, amid a flurry of activity in the options market and a couple of positive analyst assessments ahead of its earnings report due tomorrow.

Shortly after 11 a.m. ET, call options activity was roughly equivalent to the full-day average over the past 10 sessions. Bets on stock swings using call options have become a highly popular retail trade, suggesting that retail investors are getting interested in the shares ahead of the report from the partially nationalized American chip icon.

(That interpretation is buttressed by what we’re seeing on social sentiment-monitoring sites like SwaggyStocks, which at about 11:30 a.m. listed Intel as the fifth-most-mentioned stock on Reddit’s r/WallStreetBets forum over the past 24 hours.)

Wall Street analysts are also chattering about the stock, with RBC and Bernstein Research both writing about it in the last 24 hours.

RBC — which has a “sector perform” (or neutral) rating on Intel — said it expects a “slight beat and largely inline outlook” when the company reports after the close Thursday.

Bernstein’s Intel watchers — who have a “market perform” (also neutral) rating on the stock — seemed a bit more cautious, writing, “Overall numbers going forward still looking high to us. Fundamentals and valuation keep us sidelined.”

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Matt Phillips3h

BNP upgrades Seagate on more durable cycle

Seagate Technology Holdings was up in early trading after analysts at BNP Paribas upgraded the shares to “outperform” from “neutral” and lifted their price target to $380 a share, implying a gain of almost 15% from where the stock is currently trading.

The maker of the somewhat stodgy technology known as hard disk drives — or HDDs in tech lingo — was one of the top stocks in the S&P 500 for much of last year as it was swept up in the AI data center trade.

Data centers need tons of storage capacity, and demand from hyperscalers has driven up prices and created shortages for disk drives, an industry that is dominated by a duopoly of Seagate and Western Digital. (BNP also maintained its “outperform” rating on WDC in a note Wednesday.)

The analysts at BNP say they pushed by the buy button on the stock after becoming more convinced that the upswing in sales was durable, writing:

“We have witnessed a structural shift happening in HDD industry, toward 1) an effective duopoly, 2) higher mix toward data centers, and 3) disciplined capex investments. These have supported our expectations of long-term, through-cycle profitability for the HDD industry. We are now upgrading Seagate from Neutral to Outperform as we are gaining greater conviction that robust data center storage demand could drive an upcycle longer than we initially expected. We think a secular re-rating of Seagate (as well as Western Digital) to over 20x is justified.”

Nate Becker3h

Stocks jump as Trump says “I won’t use force” to acquire Greenland

In a speech in Davos, Switzerland, US President Donald Trump said he won’t use force to acquire Greenland, sending stocks higher at the open.

“We probably won't get anything unless I decide to use excessive strength and force, where we would be frankly unstoppable, but I won’t do that,” Trump told the crowd, referring to his pursuit of Greenland, which has roiled markets recently. “People thought I would use force. I don’t have to use force. I don’t want to use force. I won’t use force.”

He seemed to indicate that Denmark, which owns Greenland, could rebuff the US’s overtures to acquire the country without military retaliation.

“They have a choice. You can say yes and we will be very appreciative. Or you can say no and we will remember,” he said. Throughout his speech, Trump constantly reiterated his desire for the US to own Greenland.

Stocks rose at the open, with the S&P 500 rising 0.3%. S&P 500 futures, which had been down Wednesday morning, jumped after his comments.

J. Edward Moreno3h

J&J slips despite cheery 2026 guidance

Johnson & Johnson reported fourth-quarter sales that beat expectations and gave rosy guidance for 2026.

The company said it expects to bring in between $100 billion and $101 billion in revenue this year, compared to the $98.9 billion analysts polled by FactSet were expecting. The drugmaker also expects to report between $11.43 and $11.63 in annual adjusted earnings per share, compared to the $11.48 that Wall Street was expecting.

Despite beating expectations, J&J, the first major drugmaker to report earnings results this year, fell by more than 2% in premarket trading.