Category: News | Published: 2026-06-09
There have been big stock market debuts before. Then there is SpaceX.
On 20 May 2026, Elon Musk's rocket company filed the paperwork to go public at a valuation of $1.75 trillion, targeting a fundraise of $75 billion under the ticker SPCX on the Nasdaq. If it goes ahead at that figure, it will be the largest initial public offering in history, more than doubling the previous record set by Saudi Aramco in 2019. It will also, almost certainly, make Elon Musk the first person in history with a net worth exceeding one trillion dollars.
That sentence alone is worth sitting with for a moment.
What SpaceX Is Actually Putting on the Market
SpaceX is setting a share price of $135, with approximately 555.6 million shares on offer. At a valuation of $1.77 trillion, it would rank as the seventh largest publicly traded company on earth from the moment trading begins. For context, that puts it comfortably ahead of companies like Meta, TSMC, and Saudi Aramco.
But SpaceX is not just a rocket company any more. In February 2026, it absorbed xAI, the artificial intelligence firm behind the Grok chatbot and the social media platform X, in an all-stock deal. At the time of the merger, SpaceX was valued at $1 trillion and xAI at $250 billion. The combined entity became the most valuable private company on the planet overnight. Musk has since said his intention is to dissolve xAI as a separate company entirely, folding all AI operations under the SpaceX umbrella.
What the market is now being asked to price, therefore, is not simply a launch business. It is a satellite internet empire, an artificial intelligence lab, a social network, and a rocket programme, all controlled by one person, all wrapped inside a single filing.
The Trillionaire Calculation
Elon Musk is already the wealthiest person who has ever lived. In 2025, he became the first individual to surpass a net worth of $500 billion. His stake in Tesla, which closed with a market capitalisation of around $1.6 trillion in early June 2026, contributes a significant portion of that figure.
The SpaceX IPO would push him considerably further. Based on his shareholding, a $1.77 trillion valuation for SpaceX would add approximately $223 billion to his net worth, tipping him past the $1 trillion mark. Prediction markets have taken notice: as of early 2026, Polymarket was pricing the odds of Musk becoming a trillionaire before 2027 at 72 per cent.
For most of human history, a trillion dollars was a number associated with national economies, not individuals. That may be about to change.
The Revenue Story: Big Numbers, Bigger Losses
Here is where the story becomes more complicated. SpaceX is growing at an extraordinary pace, bringing in $18.7 billion in revenue last year, up 33 per cent on the prior year. The trouble is it is also losing money at a substantial rate.
After posting a $791 million profit in 2024, the company swung to a $4.9 billion net loss in 2025. In the first three months of 2026 alone it lost a further $4.3 billion on revenues of $4.7 billion. The xAI segment was particularly heavy: that division burned through $6.4 billion from operations in 2025 on revenues of just $3.2 billion.
Capital expenditure is also surging. SpaceX spent $20.7 billion last year, with the bulk of that, around $12.7 billion, directed at artificial intelligence infrastructure. AI capital spending is now running at an annualised pace of roughly $30.8 billion, more than doubling year on year.
The bet, in simple terms, is that the losses today buy the dominance of tomorrow.
Starlink Is the Engine Keeping Things Moving
Not everything in the filing is cause for concern. Starlink, the satellite internet division, is the standout profitable business within the group, projected to generate $4.4 billion in operating profit. The division has shown what a sustainable revenue base could look like once the capital-intensive build phase is behind it.
The filing also revealed a notable customer win: Anthropic, the AI safety company behind the Claude chatbot, has agreed to purchase computing capacity from SpaceX's Colossus 1 data centre at $1.25 billion per month through to 2029. A named anchor customer at that scale gives investors something concrete to hold on to.
The AI Ambitions Are Enormous
Musk's vision for AI within SpaceX is hard to understate. The company's IPO filing states plans to scale the Grok model to multiple trillions of parameters, a significant jump that will require substantial additional compute investment. As of March 2026, Grok had 117 million monthly active users out of 550 million total users across the platform.
The filing also outlines a potential revenue opportunity from artificial intelligence that the company values at up to $26.5 trillion. Much of that figure is tied to an idea that does not yet exist in working form: orbital data centres, with computing infrastructure placed in space. It is a compelling long-term concept, but it remains speculative for now and has not cleared any regulatory review process.
Businesses that are already thinking about how AI tools can work for them today, rather than waiting for tomorrow's orbital infrastructure, can read more about practical options on our AI Consultancy page.
The Risks Are Substantial
For all the headline numbers, the IPO filing is candid about some serious concerns. All eleven of the original co-founders of xAI have now departed the company, meaning the AI division is being rebuilt from scratch by a new team. That is an unusual situation for a business whose AI capabilities are central to its valuation.
Grok is also under investigation by eight law enforcement and regulatory agencies over concerns about deepfake content. That is a significant legal overhang. Combined with over $500 million in expected legal costs across the broader group and Musk's 85.1 per cent voting control, which leaves ordinary shareholders with very limited influence, the risk profile here is considerably higher than a standard technology listing.
The Bigger Picture: An IPO Moment for AI
SpaceX is not the only tech giant eyeing the public markets right now. Within days of the SpaceX filing, Anthropic confidentially filed its own IPO prospectus with the SEC, coming off a $65 billion Series H funding round that valued it at $965 billion. OpenAI is also reported to be preparing a confidential draft filing, targeting a public listing as early as September 2026 at a valuation above $1 trillion.
We may be approaching a defining moment in which the AI companies that have been quietly reshaping entire industries are finally priced by public markets. That transparency will be interesting for everyone watching.
What to Make of It All
Elon Musk's SpaceX IPO is one of the most unusual financial events of the decade. The company is losing billions of pounds a quarter, yet commands a valuation most sovereign wealth funds would struggle to match. Its AI division is being rebuilt after a mass departure. Its most audacious revenue thesis depends on technology that does not yet exist.
And yet Starlink is genuinely profitable. The Anthropic compute deal is real. Rocket technology leadership is real. And the person at the top of the business has already pulled off several things that were considered impossible.
Whether you think Elon Musk is on the verge of the most remarkable wealth creation in history or presiding over one of the great speculative bubbles of the modern era probably says as much about your view of AI's future as it does about SpaceX itself.