SpaceX Is Looks To Make History

The Biggest Bet in Wall Street History: SpaceX's $1.78 Trillion IPO

There are moments in financial history that stop you in your tracks. The listing of Saudi Aramco. The dot-com boom. The rise of Apple. But what is unfolding on Wall Street this week with the SpaceX initial public offering feels different. Bigger. More consequential. And in many ways, more personal, because it carries the fingerprints of one man more than any other corporate event in living memory.

Elon Musk's SpaceX has set out its stall. The company is targeting a valuation of $1.78 trillion and seeking to raise as much as $86 billion, pitching 555.6 million shares at $135 apiece. If underwriters exercise their so-called greenshoe option to sell additional shares, that $86 billion becomes a reality, making this, without question, the largest initial public offering in Wall Street history.

To put that in context, Saudi Aramco raised $29.4 billion when it listed in 2019. The SpaceX deal dwarfs that. It dwarfs everything that has come before it.

A Company Unlike Any Other

SpaceX is not a company that fits neatly into the usual templates investors reach for when assessing an IPO. It is simultaneously a rocket manufacturer, a satellite internet provider, an AI infrastructure business, and if you take Musk at his word, the vehicle through which humanity becomes a multi-planetary species. That is a lot to price into a prospectus.

The company posted revenues of $18.67 billion in 2025, yet at the proposed listing price it would trade at 92 times those revenues. For comparison, even the most generously valued Big Tech names trade at fractions of that multiple. Investors are not buying SpaceX for what it has done. They are buying it for what Musk insists it will become.

And what does Musk say it will become? The IPO prospectus lays it out with remarkable candour. Proceeds will be directed first towards AI infrastructure, then towards the development of next-generation space launch vehicles, and finally to the continued build-out of the Starlink satellite internet constellation. Management will also pitch investors on longer-term ambitions that stretch from orbital AI data centres and asteroid mining all the way to passenger transport to the Moon and Mars.

"By moving beyond the only home we have ever known," the prospectus declares, "we ensure species-level redundancy and that the light of consciousness will not be tied to a single planet." It is the kind of language that sits awkwardly in a regulatory filing, but that is SpaceX. It has never been a conventional business.

Musk's Iron Grip

What will raise eyebrows among institutional investors, and already has among some of the largest pension funds in America, is the governance structure underpinning the listing.

Musk's special class of shares will give him control of 82 per cent of the voting power at SpaceX. The Class B shares he holds are the only shares with the power to remove him as chair or chief executive. In other words, if you are buying into this IPO, you are buying into Elon Musk's vision on Elon Musk's terms. There is no board of directors empowered to check him. There is no mechanism for shareholders to redirect the company if they disagree with his strategy.^[1]

The New York State Common Retirement Fund and the chief executive of the California Public Employees' Retirement System wrote to SpaceX executives last month expressing "serious concerns" about what they described as a "novel and extreme governance structure" and Musk's "insulation from accountability". These are not activist hedge funds looking for a quick gain. These are institutions managing the retirement savings of millions of public sector workers, and they are worried.

The awkward reality for those funds, and many others like them, is that they will effectively be forced to buy SpaceX stock anyway. When the company joins major indices, as it inevitably will given its scale, passive funds indexed to the US market will have no choice but to hold the shares.

The AI Angle and the xAI Overhang

Perhaps the most revealing and troubling element of the SpaceX prospectus is not the grand ambition, but the financial plumbing quietly detailed within it.

In March 2026, SpaceX secured a $20 billion bridge loan, used to refinance debt that had been inherited from Musk's social media and AI businesses, X and xAI. That debt, in other words, belonged to entirely separate ventures. SpaceX, the rocket company, used its balance sheet to clean up the books of X, the social media platform, and xAI, the artificial intelligence lab. Within six months of the IPO, SpaceX is obliged to use a chunk of the proceeds raised from public investors to repay that bridge loan.

Critics have called this arrangement precisely what it looks like. SpaceX is going public partly to service debts that have nothing to do with rockets or satellites. Analysts at Yahoo Finance, reviewing the prospectus, were blunt: "The financials look reckless". SpaceX is a loss-making company carrying significant leverage, pitching itself at a valuation that assumes near-flawless execution of some of the most technically ambitious projects ever attempted.

Testing Wall Street's Appetite

The SpaceX roadshow kicked off on Thursday, with Wall Street analysts walking institutional investors through financial projections. The timing is pointed. Alphabet announced this week it is raising $85 billion in equity. Anthropic has confidentially filed for its own listing. OpenAI is expected to unveil IPO plans shortly. The AI capital arms race is real, and the sums involved are staggering.

Whether Wall Street has the appetite to absorb all of this at once remains an open question. Some investors are already nervous about stretched valuations across the technology sector. Others will point to the governance risks at SpaceX and the somewhat unusual arrangement of a listed rocket company carrying the debts of a social media platform.

But this is Elon Musk. And if the past decade has taught observers of global markets anything, it is that dismissing his ventures on the basis of conventional financial logic is a habit that tends to come at a cost.

The SpaceX IPO is not simply the biggest Wall Street debut of all time. It is a referendum on whether investors still believe that one man's vision of the future is worth more than the rules everyone else has to play by.