The initial excitement surrounding the public debut of Elon Musk’s SpaceX has cooled significantly, leaving many investors wondering if the rocket company was ever worth the premium. After peaking at 225 dollars, the stock has slid 40 percent as reality sets in regarding its astronomical valuation. With a market cap of 1.83 trillion dollars against roughly 32 billion in annual revenue, SpaceX currently trades at a price to sales ratio of 57. This makes it eight times more expensive than the Nasdaq 100, suggesting that despite promising growth projections, there may be further declines ahead for those holding onto the hype.
For an investor looking to put 1,000 dollars to work today, Alphabet presents a far more compelling case grounded in actual value rather than speculation. While Google Search remains the powerhouse engine driving over half of the company’s revenue, it is successfully pivoting toward an AI future. New features like AI Overviews are bridging the gap between traditional searching and chatbots, leading to a surge in user activity. In fact, search queries recently hit a five year high, pushing quarterly revenue to a record 63.3 billion dollars even as some analysts remained cautious about short term forecasts.
Beyond search, Google Cloud is emerging as a genuine juggernaut in the enterprise space. Revenue for the cloud division exploded by over 100 percent year over year to reach nearly 31 billion dollars, fueled by an insatiable corporate appetite for AI infrastructure and custom chips. Perhaps most telling is the staggering order backlog of 561 billion dollars, indicating that demand for Alphabet’s computing power and specialized hardware is growing faster than they can build data centers to support it.
When comparing the two companies side by side, Alphabet looks like a bargain. Trading at a price to sales ratio of just 7.3 and a forward price to earnings ratio around 19, it sits comfortably below the broader tech index benchmarks_and miles away from SpaceX’s inflated pricing_. Even when stripping away one time accounting boosts from its own investments in SpaceX, Alphabet’s core operational strength provides a safety net and growth potential that simply isn’t present in current aerospace valuations. For those seeking sustainable upside without the orbital risk, moving capital from rockets back to research seems like the logical play.