The numbers are in — and they are staggering. SpaceX has filed publicly for an initial public offering that would raise up to $75 billion, giving the company a market valuation of $1.77 trillion and positioning Elon Musk to become the world’s first trillionaire. The offering, set to list on the Nasdaq under the ticker SPCX, would easily surpass Saudi Aramco’s $26 billion raise in 2019 as the largest IPO in history.
SpaceX plans to offer exactly 555,555,555 shares at $135 each. Only six companies in the S&P 500 are currently worth more than the $1.77 trillion valuation the offering implies, with Nvidia sitting at the top at $5.2 trillion. Forbes currently values Musk‘s stake in SpaceX at $542 billion, based on an overall company value of $1.25 trillion. The new $1.77 trillion valuation would add approximately $223 billion to his net worth — pushing him from his current estimated $826 billion past the trillion-dollar threshold. Much of that wealth, however, remains in stock he has not yet sold.
Musk will retain extraordinary control over the company after the IPO. His ownership of 5.22 billion Class B shares — each carrying 10 votes — will give him 82.4% of the total voting power. The only person who could remove him as CEO is Musk himself, under governance structures described by major pension funds as the most management-favourable arrangement ever brought to US public markets at this scale.
Losses, AI Ambitions and a Colony on Mars
The IPO document is anything but dry. SpaceX lost $2.6 billion from operations last year on $18.7 billion in revenue, and losses continued into the start of this year. The company acknowledges the losses but frames them against an almost incomprehensible set of ambitions — using IPO proceeds to fund rocket infrastructure, expand the Starlink satellite constellation, and build data centres in space.
The filing identifies AI as a potential source of up to $26.5 trillion in future revenue — a number that depends heavily on technologies that do not yet exist at commercial scale. SpaceX merged with Musk’s AI startup xAI ahead of the offering, and a deal giving SpaceX the right to acquire AI coding tool Cursor for $60 billion later this year would give it access to the enterprise AI market currently dominated by Anthropic’s Claude and OpenAI’s ChatGPT. SpaceX’s existing computing partnership with Anthropic provides further infrastructure for that pivot.
Critics note that Grok — xAI’s main AI product — currently lags behind competitors from OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic in analyst assessments. Whether SpaceX can close that gap while simultaneously running the world’s dominant rocket launch business, operating the Starlink network, and pursuing human missions to the Moon and Mars is the central question facing any investor considering this offering.
The filing also talks openly about building a permanent human colony on Mars with at least one million inhabitants, framing the endeavour as necessary to protect humanity from the same fate as the dinosaurs. It is the kind of language rarely seen in an SEC prospectus.
SpaceX could begin trading before the end of next week. Anthropic has also submitted a confidential IPO filing with the SEC, and an offering from OpenAI is widely expected to follow. Together, they represent the most significant wave of technology market debuts since the early 2000s.
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