The Price Tag on a Takeover That Never Came
AST SpaceMobile (ASTS) closed near $61.44 a share on August 27, 2026, giving the company a market value of roughly $18 billion across about 300 million shares. That is the price you pay today for a stock that James Altucher’s True Alpha pitch told subscribers to buy as Elon Musk’s next acquisition target before March 31, 2026.
The deadline has passed. The acquisition has not. So the practical question for anyone holding or considering ASTS is no longer whether Musk buys it. It is whether the business earns the price it already trades at.
What the Multiple Says
The most useful way to size up AST SpaceMobile is against expected revenue. The company is expected to bring in around $120 million of revenue in 2026. At an $18 billion market cap, that works out to roughly 150 times expected 2026 sales.
That is a rich multiple by any standard. High-growth companies can command it when the market believes revenue will compound for years, and analysts do model strong growth here, with one or two forecasting adjusted profitability by the end of 2027. But a 150 times forward revenue multiple means the stock price already embeds a lot of future success. There is not much room for the story to merely match expectations; it has to beat them, and keep beating them for a long time.
For context, most large telecom and satellite operators trade at a small fraction of that multiple, because their revenue is slower growing and capital intensive. AST SpaceMobile is priced more like a software growth story than a satellite operator, which is a bet on the direct-to-cell category scaling far beyond what it has shown so far.
The Scoreboard on the Buyout Call
The original teaser tracking recorded a buy price of $73.82 for the teased pick, with a last close of $59.88 on the day the March 31 deadline landed. That is a drop of about 18.9%. Five months later, the stock sits near $61.44, still below the price at which the pitch told people to buy.
That is the actual scoreboard for the specific prediction. The pitch promised a buyout by a calendar date, and the date passed with no buyer, no offer, and no court to force one. the record speaks plainly: nothing reliable has ever surfaced about anyone wanting to buy AST SpaceMobile.
Why the Takeover Math Never Worked
The pitch leaned on the Twitter anchor, a turn of $10,000 into $133,620 in one week. Twitter in 2022 was a hostile takeover compelled by a Delaware court after Musk tried to walk away from the deal. That is not a template for a buyout trade; it is a one-off event forced by litigation.
The mechanism pitched here, that AST SpaceMobile owns the patented satellite power technology for orbital data centers, does not match what the company’s patents actually cover. They cover direct-to-cell connectivity, not orbital compute power. The whole takeover thesis rests on a conflation between a cellular broadband company and an orbital power company.
What Actually Matters for the Stock
Strip away the takeover story and you are left with a valuation question, not a mystery. AST SpaceMobile is a real company with real direct-to-cell patents, real revenue, and real momentum in the space economy. The stock already ran from roughly $3 to over $100 at its highs, which is part of why it trades at 150 times forward revenue today.
For the company behind the ticker, see our AST SpaceMobile explainer. We break down the multiple and the revenue in our ASTS stock piece, and the orbital data center power idea in our AI data center power stocks article.
The honest frame is simple: this is a growth stock priced for a lot to go right, not a takeover arbitrage waiting to happen. Confusing the two is how investors end up overpaying for a story that was never on the table.
What Would Make the Multiple Work
A 150 times forward revenue multiple only makes sense under a specific set of assumptions. Revenue has to compound quickly for several years. The direct-to-cell category has to become mainstream rather than a niche, moving from a novelty in dead zones to a routine part of how people connect. And AST SpaceMobile has to hold its position against SpaceX’s Starlink, which is building a competing direct-to-cell service through a major wireless carrier.
The milestones that matter are concrete and watchable. How many BlueBird satellites reach orbit and begin commercial service? Which carriers sign on and expand coverage across more countries? When does revenue cross from tens of millions into the hundreds of millions, and does gross margin turn positive as the constellation scales up? Each of these is a public, verifiable data point, and together they tell you whether the growth the multiple assumes is actually arriving.
Until those milestones show up in the numbers, the stock is priced on promise rather than proof. That is not a reason to avoid the name. It is a reason to size the position carefully and to track the milestones rather than the takeover headlines, which already proved to be the least reliable part of the story.
NewsletterVetter is an independent publication. We receive compensation from some of the services we review through affiliate links. Nothing on this site is investment advice. Always do your own research.