SpaceX Plans $75 Billion IPO This Month, Could Make Elon Musk First Trillionaire
SpaceX filed to raise $75 billion at $1.77 trillion valuation in largest-ever IPO, potentially making Musk world's first trillionaire while maintaining 82% voting control.
Objective Facts
SpaceX plans to raise up to $75 billion when it goes public this month, setting the stage for the largest-ever stock market debut and putting Elon Musk on course to becoming the world's first trillionaire. The company said Wednesday it will sell 555.6 million shares at $135 a piece, giving SpaceX a market value of $1.77 trillion. Musk would have 82.4% of the voting power in the company. In February this year, Musk merged SpaceX with xAI, his artificial intelligence company that includes his social media platform, X. SpaceX is currently losing billions of dollars a year, having lost $2.6 billion from operations last year on $18.7 billion in revenue.
Left-Leaning Perspective
Denmark's AkademikerPension blacklisted SpaceX, citing its "catastrophic governance structure," according to Bloomberg. Marcie Frost, CEO of California Public Employees' Retirement System, joined New York City Comptroller Mark Levine and the State of New York Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli to issue a letter in mid-May to Musk about the "extreme governance structure" at the space company. Left-leaning institutional investors focus on the dual-class share structure as fundamentally undemocratic, with only Elon Musk able to fire Elon Musk as CEO, meaning public shareholders have almost no say in how SpaceX is run. Left-aligned analysts also highlight the company's losses and unproven AI business as red flags. The xAI integration is unproven, SpaceX posted a $4.94 billion net loss in 2025, largely from merger costs, and the synergies between rocket launches and large language models are asserted, not demonstrated. While the company's proven businesses today are launch services and Starlink, a significant portion of the valuation narrative is tied to more forward-looking opportunities including xAI, orbital compute, and enterprise AI, raising a fundamental question whether the same cost advantages and synergies SpaceX has built through vertical integration can realistically be replicated in the far more competitive and capital-intensive AI market. Left-leaning coverage also notes wealth inequality concerns. Critics note that at the same time five billion people on Earth are living below the poverty line, creating an "extreme inequality" that can spawn civil wars and other crises. The Danish pension fund's statement that the stock is propelled more by Musk's "narratives than by economic realities" captures a recurring theme in progressive institutional investor critiques.
Right-Leaning Perspective
Brett Winton, chief futurist at ARK Invest, argues the company's satellite internet business alone can justify a valuation approaching $2 trillion. Winton stated "I think this historical moment is going to be looked back upon as the critical technological inflection, maybe in the history of humanity." Right-aligned analysts emphasize SpaceX's proven dominance in commercial space. SpaceX's company already dominates the global launch market, lofting 85% of all the satellites that went up in 2025, most of which were its own Starlink broadband craft, which constitute more than 75% of all active satellites in Earth orbit. Right-leaning and pro-business sources highlight Starlink's profitability as the anchor for the valuation thesis. ~$7 billion annually from satellite internet is growing 40%+ as the constellation expands toward 42,000 satellites, generating cash and justifying a premium over traditional aerospace, with Starlink having 5+ million subscribers globally with minimal churn and expanding into aviation, maritime, and government contracts. The upcoming Starship rocket could dramatically accelerate that growth by reducing launch costs and enabling SpaceX to deploy far more satellites at a faster pace. Right-aligned sources present the AI opportunity as genuine, not speculative. The money raised will help expand the company's three main businesses: rockets and space travel (including Starship development), Starlink satellite internet and mobile service, and artificial intelligence computing, with executives calling the potential market across these areas "the largest actionable total addressable market in human history," worth an estimated $28.5 trillion.
Deep Dive
SpaceX's $75 billion IPO at a $1.77 trillion valuation represents a fundamental tension in modern capital markets: how to price companies with proven current revenues but speculative future dominance. As recently as 2024, SpaceX's last primary market valuation stood at approximately $210 billion. The $135/share IPO price implies a valuation of $1.77 trillion—an 8.4× multiple on that figure in under two years. This leap reflects not merely operational expansion but the market's bet on three convergent narratives: Starlink scaling to global dominance in satellite broadband, Starship reducing launch costs by an order of magnitude, and xAI becoming a competitive player in generative AI. The core analytical disagreement hinges on which businesses deserve credit for which portions of the valuation. Starlink is the only genuinely profitable business, having brought in roughly $11.4 billion in revenue last year with $4.4 billion in operating profit. By traditional valuation multiples, Starlink alone might justify $300-400 billion in value. This leaves roughly $1.3-1.4 trillion attributed to Starship development (largely R&D spend with no current revenue), orbital AI infrastructure (unproven), and the X platform ecosystem. Left-aligned critics correctly note that the AI segment generated $3.2 billion in revenue but posted a $6.355 billion operating loss in 2025, suggesting the merged AI business is destroying value. Right-aligned investors counter that these losses represent investment in future infrastructure that, if successful, dwarfs all current business lines. The governance structure creates an asymmetry that institutional investors on the left explicitly reject. The Danish pension fund stated that the stock is propelled more by Musk's "narratives than by economic realities," and this critique transcends left-right divides—it reflects a real concern that public shareholders have no mechanism to course-correct if Musk's strategic bets (orbital data centers, AI platform competition, Tesla-SpaceX merger) underperform. What neither side fully grapples with is that SpaceX will be the largest IPO in U.S. history by initial market value, and the 10 largest U.S. IPO stocks on record have underperformed the S&P 500 by an average of 127 percentage points. Historical precedent suggests buyers should wait for a repricing.