SpaceX Takes the IPO Plunge, Setting Musk up for a Shot at Trillionaire Status

The Economist, BBC, the Verge, Axios, Bloomberg, and CNBC contributed to this report.

Elon Musk’s SpaceX has finally shown its hand: the rocket maker is preparing to go public in the US, opening the door for investors to buy shares on the stock market and giving Wall Street a fresh excuse to obsess over Musk’s net worth.

If the deal goes through as expected, it could be the biggest IPO in Wall Street history. Shares may start trading as soon as next month under the ticker SPCX. And if SpaceX gets anywhere near the valuation it is aiming for, Musk’s already enormous fortune could jump into a new tier altogether.

SpaceX is valuing itself at $1.25 trillion, and because Musk owns the bulk of the company, his stake alone could be worth more than $600 billion. That would put his total fortune above $1 trillion. The first trillionaire, in other words, could come wrapped in a SpaceX filing.

The numbers inside the prospectus are not exactly a portrait of a tidy, mature cash machine. Last year, SpaceX brought in $18.6 billion in revenue and posted a $4.9 billion loss. In the first three months of this year, it logged $4.7 billion in sales and still lost $4.3 billion. The company has assets worth about $102 billion, but it also carries $60.5 billion in debt.

That kind of financial profile is not unusual for a giant, expensive moonshot. Venture investors are used to the idea that big space projects burn money before they make it. Ruth Foxe-Blader of Citrine Venture Partners called the losses unsurprising, even at the IPO stage, and said the listing has been expected for a while. Her view: SpaceX is huge, sprawling and packed with future-facing businesses.

The filing also lays out some of the messier parts of Musk’s empire. SpaceX flagged more than half a billion dollars in expected legal costs tied to a pile of lawsuits. Some of them involve claims around Grok, the chatbot tied to xAI, including accusations that it has been used to create sexualized deepfakes of real women and girls. Other cases involve patent claims, content-moderation disputes in Europe, copyright issues and data-breach allegations.

There is also a new wrinkle on the AI front. The filing says SpaceX recently struck a deal with Anthropic, the maker of Claude, under which Anthropic will pay $15 billion a year for access to data centers in the U.S. South for xAI. That deal suggests Musk’s AI ambitions are still very much alive, even if his own AI efforts have been clouded by controversy.

SpaceX is still the real engine here. Its rockets and Starlink internet service are the big attractions, and they remain leaders in their markets. Starlink, especially, is the profitable piece of the puzzle and accounted for most of the company’s revenue last quarter.

The timing is awkward, though maybe typical for Musk. The IPO filing landed just days after he lost his courtroom battle against OpenAI and Sam Altman. He had accused OpenAI of abandoning its nonprofit roots, but the case was tossed on procedural grounds after a jury ruled he waited too long to sue.

So now the story shifts from courtrooms to capital markets. SpaceX is heading toward a public debut that could reshape Musk’s fortune and force investors to decide just how much faith they want to place in rockets, satellites, AI, and the man behind all three.