AP
- SpaceX will be valued at $500 billion by 2030, billionaire investor Ron Baron predicted.
- The company's reusable rockets will help build "the railroad to space," he told CNBC.
- Baron has previously forecast that Tesla will be worth $4 trillion within a decade.
SpaceX will be worth half a trillion dollars by the end of the decade, Ron Baron said Friday.
The billionaire investor said he expected the valuation of Elon Musk's company to surge as it toys with the idea of an IPO for its Starlink satellite business, which he predicts will happen about 2027.
"We think that by the time they go public with Starlink in the next three years or four years, the company will be worth $250 billion to $300 billion," Baron told CNBC's "Squawk Box".
"I think by 2030 it could be worth somewhere around $500 billion. I think we could make four times our money," he added.
SpaceX is still private, but share sales by existing investors earlier this year valued it at $150 billion, according to reports from Bloomberg and CNBC.
Baron also revealed that his investment management firm, Baron Capital, has allocated about 4% of its portfolio to SpaceX and another 10% to Tesla, which is its largest overall holding.
He said much of his bullish valuation outlook for SpaceX was based on the company's efforts to develop reusable rockets and flagged reports by Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley that predicted the space economy would be worth more than $1 trillion by 2040.
"We think about it as the railroad to space – just like the old railroad opened up the West, the railroad they have is the rocket that goes up and down again," Baron told CNBC.
It's not the first time Baron has predicted a massive future valuation for one of Musk's companies.
Earlier this month, he said he expected Tesla's market capitalization to rise sixfold to $4 trillion over the next 10 years, calling the world's richest person a "brilliant guy."
"We do need to knock the ball out of the park several times to achieve that value, but I think we can," Musk said in a post on X, replying to a short clip of Baron sharing his outlook.