SpaceX: The IPO Elon Musk Has Been Building Towards Since 2002
Dear reader,
On April Fool’s Day, Elon Musk filed his S-1 with the SEC. Whether the date was deliberate is exactly the kind of thing you’d expect from him.
The prospectus went public on May 20th. 685 pages. SpaceX is targeting a June 12th listing, wants to raise $75 billion, and is going out at a valuation of $1.75 trillion which would make it the largest IPO in history, full stop. Bigger than Saudi Aramco. Bigger than anything.
For the first time, ordinary people will be able to buy a piece of it.
From the sofa to the launchpad
To appreciate what that means, it helps to remember where SpaceX started. Musk founded it in 2002 with around $100 million of his own money, most of what he’d made selling PayPal. He has said publicly that he went in expecting the company to fail. The first three Falcon 1 rockets blew up. The fourth one worked, in 2008, the same year Tesla nearly went bankrupt and Musk’s first marriage ended. He was, by most accounts, sleeping on friends’ sofas.
That company now conducts 82% of all US space launches. Starlink has millions of subscribers worldwide and is genuinely profitable. Starship, the largest rocket ever built, is flying. The core business generated $15.5 billion in revenue last year from launch services and satellites alone.
Whatever you think of Musk, the execution has been extraordinary.
Rockets funding chatbots
The S-1 reveals that in February SpaceX absorbed xAI, Musk’s AI company, which also owns X in an all-stock deal valuing the combined entity at $1.25 trillion. The filing shows the AI division is burning cash heavily while it builds out data centres in Tennessee. That has pushed the combined group to a net loss of $4.94 billion despite $18.67 billion in revenue.
When he announced the deal, Musk didn’t dwell on the numbers. “Current advances in AI are dependent on large terrestrial data centers, which require immense amounts of power and cooling,” he wrote. “Global electricity demand for AI simply cannot be met with terrestrial solutions, even in the near term. Space-based AI is obviously the only way to scale.”
Some will see the losses as a red flag. The other way to read it is that Musk is doing exactly what he always does using a profitable business to fund the next frontier before anyone else has figured out the map. Starlink was once the speculative bet bleeding money inside the SpaceX balance sheet. Now it’s the engine. xAI might follow the same arc.
The small print
Then there’s the governance structure, which has attracted the usual complaints from institutional investors. Musk holds roughly 42% of the equity and controls about 85% of the votes through a dual-class share arrangement. He can’t be fired unless he fires himself.
Critics call this unaccountable. It’s worth asking, though, accountable to whom, and for what? The history of Musk’s companies is largely a story of him doing things that boards, investors, and analysts said were impossible or irresponsible and then doing them. Tesla was going to zero. Falcon 9 would never be reusable. Starship was a fantasy.
The control structure exists because he built something that nobody else built, and the bet on SpaceX is inseparable from the bet on him.
A million people on Mars
The detail that really stays with you is the compensation package the board granted him in January. One billion performance shares, vesting on a single condition: SpaceX must establish a permanent human colony on Mars with at least one million inhabitants.
Not a revenue target. Not a margin threshold. A million people on another planet.
There is no financial model for that. There is no comparable precedent anywhere in the history of capital markets. It is a preposterous thing to write into a legal document — and somehow, given everything SpaceX has already done, not entirely easy to dismiss.
June 12th
At $1.75 trillion, Musk’s stake alone is worth around $735 billion. Add Tesla, and he becomes the world’s first trillionaire on listing day. The roadshow starts June 4th.
For twenty-four years this company was private. The people who believed in it early enough were mostly insiders, institutions, and the very wealthy. On June 12th that changes. You’ll be able to buy a share of the rockets, the satellites, the AI, and whatever comes after including, if Musk has his way, the first human footprints on Mars.
It is, whatever else it is, the most interesting thing on the market.
Thanks for reading,
Ollz
This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute financial advice. Always do your own research before making investment decisions.