Will This Airline Upstart Be a Massive Winner?

One reason Joby has survived the post-SPAC reckoning is its deepening relationship with the U.S. Department of Defense. The company holds a $131 million contract to deliver up to nine aircraft to the U.S. Air Force, and it has already delivered multiple units.

That relationship does more than generate modest revenue. Military testing accelerates certification, validates durability under extreme conditions, and quietly subsidizes development costs. Historically, many aerospace breakthroughs, from jet engines to GPS, matured first through defense programs before becoming commercial staples.

Joby is following that playbook almost to the letter, so will the stock take off?

Key Points

• Defense contracts plus partners like Toyota and Delta reduce execution risk.

• The stock looks expensive today, but if eVTOL adoption scales over decades, Joby’s upside may well be far larger than near-term losses suggest.

Key partners with real incentives

Joby’s investor and partner list reads less like a speculative startup and more like a long-term infrastructure bet. Toyota has invested hundreds of millions of dollars and provides manufacturing expertise that could eventually matter more than the aircraft design itself. Scaling aerospace production is notoriously difficult, and Toyota’s involvement hints at how seriously Joby is thinking about mass manufacturing.

On the customer side, Delta Air Lines isn’t just experimenting for fun. Delta sees eVTOLs getting premium passengers from dense city centers to airports faster than ground traffic allows.

Meanwhile, Joby’s acquisition of Uber Elevate, means these flights could eventually be booked as easily as a car ride.

That kind of distribution advantage is hard to replicate and rarely shows up in discounted cash flow models.

The real bottleneck is regulation

Everything hinges on certification. Joby expects the Federal Aviation Administration to approve its first commercial operations in 2026, with Dubai likely launching even sooner thanks to a more centralized regulatory environment.

This matters because the FAA approval process is sequential. Once the first aircraft clears the hurdle, follow-on approvals tend to accelerate. That creates a winner-takes-time dynamic, where early movers gain disproportionate market access.

Thinking in decades

Near-term forecasts suggest Joby could generate a couple hundred million dollars in annual revenue by the late 2020s, which makes today’s valuation look expensive if you stop there.

But the long-term math is where the story changes.

According to a global market outlook from Eve Air Mobility, there could be roughly 30,000 eVTOL aircraft serving billions of passengers worldwide by the mid-2040s as they replace short-range helicopter routes. Even conservative assumptions put the average selling price of an aircraft near $1 million.

If Joby captured just a third of that market and sold 10,000 aircraft annually, revenue may well eventually 10x. At that scale, today’s losses fade into the background, and the business starts to resemble a next-generation aerospace manufacturer rather than a speculative startup.

A patient investor’s kind of risk

Cash burn, regulatory risk, and execution challenges are real. But for those willing to think in decades instead of years, Joby offers something rare: a credible shot at defining an entirely new transportation layer.

If urban air mobility becomes as commonplace as ridesharing once did, Joby’s slow climb may well eventually look like the quiet takeoff before a very long flight.