SpaceX Opens the Books Ahead of Historic IPO

SpaceX has finally unveiled its long-anticipated IPO filing, offering the clearest public look yet at the finances behind Elon Musk’s space empire — and at ambitions that stretch far beyond rockets and satellites.

If the offering hits its projected valuation of $1.75 trillion, SpaceX would become the most valuable company ever to go public, surpassing the record set by Saudi Aramco in 2019. It would also move Musk closer to becoming the world’s first trillionaire, a milestone tied not only to the company’s commercial success but also to investors continuing to buy into his increasingly expansive vision of the future.

The filing marks a turning point for a company that spent more than two decades operating largely behind closed doors while reshaping the economics of spaceflight through reusable rockets and the rapid expansion of its Starlink satellite network.

Most of SpaceX’s $18.67bn in revenue last year came from Starlink, which now operates roughly 10,000 satellites delivering broadband internet services to consumers, businesses and governments around the world. The network has effectively become the financial engine supporting Musk’s broader aerospace ambitions.

At the same time, the IPO documents make clear that SpaceX increasingly sees its future tied to artificial intelligence infrastructure. The company told investors it is targeting a potential market worth $28.5 trillion, with much of that linked to AI-related businesses and computing capacity in space.

That future, however, remains expensive and largely unproven.

According to the filing, SpaceX’s xAI division — connected to Musk’s Grok chatbot project — is still losing money. Yet the company is betting heavily that AI demand, combined with satellite infrastructure and future space-based data centres, will drive long-term growth.

The IPO disclosure arrives during a particularly important week for the company, as SpaceX prepares another test flight of Starship, the next-generation rocket Musk sees as essential to missions to the Moon and Mars. The launch had originally been planned for Tuesday but is now expected later this week.

The filing also reveals just how closely Musk’s compensation is tied to highly ambitious goals. Much of his pay package depends on targets that include building a permanent human colony on Mars and creating orbital data centres powered by compute capacity equivalent to 100 terawatts — roughly the output of 100,000 one-gigawatt nuclear reactors.

For investors, the challenge is that there are few meaningful comparisons for a company like SpaceX. Analysts cited in the filing note that Musk’s public image and influence may matter as much as the company’s actual fundamentals because no direct benchmark exists for a business combining rockets, satellite internet, AI infrastructure and long-term colonisation plans.

The scale of the offering is also drawing attention to what some analysts describe as the “Muskonomy” — the increasingly interconnected network of companies linked to Musk, including Tesla, xAI and Neuralink. SpaceX recently merged with xAI in a deal valuing the rocket company at $1 trillion and the AI firm at $250bn.

That overlap is creating new questions about concentration of control, investor exposure and whether Musk can realistically manage multiple trillion-dollar-scale businesses simultaneously.

Still, demand for the IPO is expected to be enormous.

SpaceX plans to reserve a significant portion of shares for retail investors, with the listing expected as early as June 12 on the Nasdaq under the ticker symbol “SPCX”. Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, Citigroup and JP Morgan are serving as bookrunners.