SpaceX has put final terms on the most anticipated stock offering in market history. The company said Wednesday it will sell exactly 555,555,555 shares at $135 apiece, raising up to $75 billion in an initial public offering that would shatter every record in the books and value Space Exploration Technologies Corp. at $1.77 trillion. According to CBS News, the proceeds would easily eclipse the $26 billion raised by Saudi Aramco in 2019, the previous high-water mark for a market debut, and the valuation would instantly make SpaceX more valuable than all but six companies in the S&P 500.
The offering also sets up a milestone that has hovered over financial markets for years: Elon Musk becoming the world’s first trillionaire. Based on SpaceX’s updated prospectus, Musk owns shares in the company worth more than $866 billion at the IPO price, on top of his stake in Tesla worth over $350 billion. Forbes currently pegs his net worth at $826 billion, a figure built on a SpaceX valuation of $1.25 trillion. Repricing the company at $1.77 trillion would add roughly $223 billion to that number and carry the world’s richest person across the trillion-dollar threshold, a level of individual wealth without precedent in modern economic history.
SpaceX plans to list on the Nasdaq under the ticker SPCX, with trading expected to begin as soon as the end of next week. The company reportedly paid to secure the ticker symbol in advance, a small but telling detail about how deliberately this debut has been choreographed.
Control Stays Firmly With Musk
The amended prospectus answers the question that institutional investors care about most: who runs the company after the float. The answer is Musk, overwhelmingly. As chief executive, chief technical officer, and chairman, Musk will hold 5.22 billion Class B shares carrying ten votes apiece, giving him 82.4% of total voting power. Public shareholders are buying economic exposure to SpaceX’s future; they are not buying influence over it.
That concentration of control is consistent with how Musk has operated Tesla, and it did not deter the anchor demand that has been building for weeks. BlackRock has been in talks to invest $5 billion to $10 billion as a cornerstone of the offering, with Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, Citigroup, JPMorgan, and Goldman Sachs running the books. Cornerstone orders of that scale, placed before pricing, are how underwriters build confidence to price a deal of unprecedented size at the top of its range.
A Money-Losing Rocket Company Priced Like an AI Giant
For all its ambition, the financial profile in SpaceX’s filing is sobering. The company lost $2.6 billion from operations last year on $18.7 billion in revenue, and losses continued mounting in the first part of this year. A $1.77 trillion valuation on those numbers is not a bet on rockets or even on Starlink’s satellite internet business as it exists today. It is a bet on what the prospectus describes in unusually vivid language: a future in which SpaceX is a dominant artificial intelligence company.
The filing claims potential AI revenue of up to $26.5 trillion, an extraordinary figure resting on Musk’s plan to put data centers in space, a capability that does not yet exist technologically. The document departs freely from the dry conventions of securities prose, describing the need to build a permanent human colony on Mars with at least one million inhabitants, and warning that humanity must become multi-planetary or risk the same fate as the dinosaurs.
Skeptics note that SpaceX’s flagship AI product, the Grok chatbot inherited through the xAI merger, trails the field. IDC analyst Arnal Dayaratna called Grok less impressive than offerings from OpenAI, Anthropic, or Google’s Gemini, and noted that all 11 of Musk’s xAI co-founders have departed, some recruited by rivals. The bull case rests instead on infrastructure and distribution: SpaceX’s computing partnership with Anthropic, which includes joint space-based compute development, and Musk’s deal granting SpaceX rights to acquire the AI coding tool Cursor for $60 billion later this year, which would give the company a direct line into the enterprise developer market now dominated by Anthropic’s Claude and OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
IPO proceeds are earmarked for AI and rocket infrastructure expansion and for building out the satellite constellation powering Starlink Mobile. Dan Ives of Wedbush Securities expects Tesla and SpaceX to merge next year, which would consolidate Musk’s robotaxi, humanoid robot, rocket, satellite, and AI ambitions into a single entity of almost incomprehensible scale.
The Dam Breaks for Mega-IPOs
Beyond Musk’s personal milestone, the SPCX debut marks the reopening of public markets for the giants of the AI era after years of muted IPO activity. Anthropic filed confidentially with the SEC earlier this week to start its own IPO clock, and an OpenAI listing is widely expected to follow, though the ChatGPT maker has not yet reported filing initial paperwork.
“This listing represents the first major test for public markets after years of muted IPO activity with SpaceX paving the way for AI giants Anthropic and OpenAI to follow soon after,” Ives wrote in a research note.
The market backdrop is cooperative, if jittery. “The AI trade continues to roar, just in time for SpaceX’s IPO next week,” said Kathleen Brooks, research director at brokerage XTB in London. The S&P 500 sits near record highs and AI infrastructure spending remains the dominant force in equity markets, even as Thursday’s sharp selloff in Broadcom shares demonstrated how little tolerance investors have for anything short of perfection from AI names.
That tension frames the stakes for SPCX’s first prints. A strong debut validates the pipeline behind it and potentially unlocks hundreds of billions of dollars in AI listings over the next year. A weak one would be read as the moment the market finally blinked at AI valuations. With only six S&P 500 companies worth more than SpaceX’s proposed valuation, and Nvidia topping the list at $5.2 trillion, the company is asking public investors to underwrite a vision that spans from low Earth orbit to the surface of Mars.
Retail enthusiasm, at least, is not in question. Brokerages have reported surging interest in pre-IPO exposure, with some platforms offering synthetic instruments tied to the deal, and the offering has dominated financial media for weeks. Whether that enthusiasm survives contact with a money-losing income statement at a $1.77 trillion price tag is the question the market answers next week.
