Elon Musk’s SpaceX unveils filing for blockbuster IPO

SpaceX has taken off the wraps off its IPO filing, opening the books of the company that has already revolutionised rocket technology, with even larger ambitions to colonise Mars and build AI data centres in space.

A successful sale could value the company at a record-setting $1.75 trillion, which would put its founder on track to become the first trillionaire in history, validating years of defying accepted logic through the development of rockets that can land and be flown again.

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The listing, unveiled on Wednesday, could set the stage for a number of monumental IPOs in the coming months, among them potentially technology giants OpenAI and Anthropic. The sale would immediately cement SpaceX as one of the world’s most valuable publicly traded companies, the second in Elon Musk’s sprawling business empire to surpass $1 trillion in market value, after Tesla.

SpaceX has grown into the world’s largest space business since its founding in 2002 by launching thousands of Starlink internet satellites.  Most of its $18.67bn in revenue last year came from its network of about 10,000 satellites, which offers broadband internet to consumers, governments and enterprise customers.

Its pioneering use of reusable rockets has transformed the economics of space, forcing competitors like Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin to play catch-up as the race to commercialise space has intensified and private companies compete to slash launch costs, deploy satellite networks and secure government contracts.

While much of SpaceX’s future growth hinges on artificial intelligence-related businesses, its nascent xAI unit still loses money, according to the filing.

The company’s regulatory disclosure comes during a critical week for the rocket maker, which is preparing to launch a test flight of its next-generation Starship rocket.

Musk’s plans for lunar and Mars missions and to expand its Starlink satellite internet business depend on the new rocket. The test launch, originally scheduled for Tuesday, is now expected later this week.

The board has given Musk control over the company, but ties much of his compensation to audacious targets of establishing a permanent human colony on Mars and building space data centres with compute capacity powered by the equivalent of 100 terawatts, or 100,000 one-gigawatt nuclear reactors.

The share sale is expected as early as June 11, with a listing aimed for the next day.

Celebrity persona

Musk’s CEO celebrity persona may matter more to some investors than SpaceX’s underlying business fundamentals, analysts and academics said, because there are no other comparable companies against which to benchmark its valuation.

The company said it was targeting a potential total market of $28.5 trillion across its businesses, with a majority of that possible revenue tied to AI.

The figures, disclosed for the first time to the public in its S-1 regulatory filing, show how SpaceX depends on its Starlink-driven revenue base, but believes its long-term prospects centre around AI and related infrastructure operations that are currently unprofitable.

The $1.75 trillion valuation target, if achieved, would eclipse Saudi Aramco’s 2019 offering, which set a record for the world’s biggest IPO when it debuted on Riyadh’s exchange at a value of $1.7 trillion. SpaceX had planned to try to raise more than $75bn in the offering, the Reuters news agency previously reported.

The scale of the offering has drawn attention to the increasingly interconnected structure of Musk’s business empire, often dubbed the “Muskonomy”, which includes leading electric vehicle company Tesla, as well as his businesses in AI and brain-chip implants.

SpaceX merged with Musk’s xAI in a deal that valued the rocket company at $1 trillion and the developer of the Grok chatbot at $250bn.

Concerns about Musk’s ability to juggle multiple companies with combined market values exceeding trillions could weigh on investor sentiment, analysts said.

SpaceX plans to earmark a significant portion of shares for retail investors.

The company is expected to list on the Nasdaq under the ticker symbol ‘SPCX’.

Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, Citigroup and JP Morgan are the bookrunners.