- The SpaceX IPO aims to raise at least $75 billion, making it the largest public offering in history by a wide margin.
- At $135 per share, the SpaceX IPO values the company at roughly $1.77 trillion — more than most national economies.
- Elon Musk will retain 82.4% voting power after the IPO, keeping near-total control of company decisions.
- SpaceX lost $4.3 billion in Q1 2026, with AI spending — not rockets — driving most of that deficit.
- The SpaceX IPO aims to raise at least $75 billion, making it the largest public offering in history by a wide margin.
- At $135 per share, the SpaceX IPO values the company at roughly $1.77 trillion — more than most national economies.
- Elon Musk will retain 82.4% voting power after the IPO, keeping near-total control of company decisions.
- SpaceX lost $4.3 billion in Q1 2026, with AI spending — not rockets — driving most of that deficit.
The SpaceX IPO Is Unlike Anything Wall Street Has Ever Seen
The SpaceX IPO is officially the most audacious public market debut in history. On June 3, SpaceX filed an updated prospectus with the Securities and Exchange Commission laying out the specifics: 555,555,555 shares of Class A stock priced at $135 each. Do the math and you get $75 billion before expenses — a figure that doesn’t just break records, it obliterates them.
For context, Saudi Aramco’s 2019 IPO was previously the world’s largest, raising $29.4 billion when the Saudi oil giant listed on the Tadawul exchange. The SpaceX IPO is targeting more than double that. The underwriters — whose identities haven’t been fully disclosed — also have the option to buy an additional 83.3 million shares within 30 days of the offering, which would push the total haul to nearly $86.3 billion in gross proceeds, or approximately $85.7 billion net.
At the IPO price, SpaceX’s total valuation lands at approximately $1.77 trillion. That puts it comfortably among the most valuable companies on Earth, in the same stratosphere as Apple, Nvidia, and Microsoft. And here’s the kicker: the shares being sold represent less than 5% of total outstanding stock. The SpaceX IPO isn’t a company desperately seeking capital by handing out equity. It’s a controlled release, carefully choreographed to generate enormous liquidity without diluting existing shareholders in any meaningful way.
Where Will the $75 Billion Actually Go?
SpaceX’s prospectus is characteristically sparse on specifics. The company says it intends to use proceeds from the SpaceX IPO to fund its “growth strategy,” citing expansion of AI compute infrastructure, improvements to launch infrastructure and vehicles, and scaling its satellite constellations. Any remainder goes to general corporate purposes — which is the kind of language that tells you almost nothing while technically telling you everything.
But you can piece together the priorities from the financial data buried elsewhere in the filing. In Q1 2026, SpaceX reported $10.1 billion in capital expenditures. Of that, $7.7 billion — roughly 76% — went to its AI division. Starship development, the crown jewel of its launch ambitions, consumed just $930 million in the same period. That’s a striking inversion of what most people assume SpaceX is actually about.
The AI division in question came via SpaceX’s acquisition of xAI — Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company — in February of this year. That deal folded xAI’s assets, talent, and infrastructure into SpaceX’s balance sheet, and the consequences are written all over the financials. SpaceX posted a net loss of nearly $4.3 billion in Q1 2026 on revenue of $4.7 billion. For the full year 2025, the company generated $18.7 billion in revenue while losing more than $4.9 billion. The AI division isn’t just an expensive side project — it’s currently the single biggest drain on the company’s finances.
Longer term, the prospectus describes some truly ambitious bets. SpaceX is eyeing eventual deployment of up to one million orbital data center spacecraft. That’s not a typo. If realized, it would represent the largest distributed computing infrastructure ever conceived, combining Starlink’s connectivity backbone with AI compute capacity at a scale that has no precedent.
Elon Musk’s Grip on SpaceX Isn’t Loosening
If you’re hoping that the SpaceX IPO means the company becomes more accountable to outside investors, the prospectus should temper that expectation quickly. Musk will hold 82.4% of the voting power in the company after the IPO, courtesy of Class B shares that carry ten times the voting weight of the Class A shares being sold to the public.
The document is blunt about what that means:
“As a result, Mr. Musk will be able to control the outcome of matters requiring shareholder approval.”
SpaceX will be listed on Nasdaq and classified as a “controlled company” under Nasdaq’s own rules — a designation that means it isn’t required to maintain a majority of independent directors on its board. Buying a share through the SpaceX IPO is buying exposure to its revenue, growth potential, and balance sheet. It’s not buying influence over how the company is run. That remains Musk’s domain, full stop.
This dual-class structure isn’t unique to SpaceX — Alphabet, Meta, and Snap all use similar arrangements — but the degree of concentration here is exceptional. At 82.4% voting control, Musk can block any resolution, approve any transaction, and set any strategic direction without needing to consult the public shareholder base at all. For investors who watched Musk’s turbulent acquisition of Twitter and his increasingly unpredictable public profile, that’s either a feature or a significant red flag, depending on your risk appetite.
The Revenue Story Is More Complicated Than the Hype
SpaceX isn’t a struggling startup burning cash with no income. $18.7 billion in annual revenue is a real business. Its SEC filings suggest a company with genuine commercial momentum, particularly through Starlink, which has grown from a niche broadband experiment into a global connectivity product with millions of subscribers across consumer, enterprise, maritime, and aviation markets.
The launch business is equally formidable. SpaceX’s Falcon 9 has become the de facto workhorse of the global launch industry, routinely carrying commercial satellites, NASA cargo, and crewed missions to the International Space Station. No other launch provider comes close in terms of cadence or reliability at scale.
But the losses matter. A company posting $4.9 billion in annual net losses while simultaneously attempting the largest SpaceX IPO in history is making a very particular argument to investors: trust the trajectory, not the current snapshot. It’s asking the market to fund a long game — Starship, AI infrastructure at orbital scale, global internet dominance — rather than reward near-term profitability. That’s not an unusual ask in tech. Amazon ran at or near breakeven for years while building AWS. But the scale of SpaceX’s ambitions, and the speed at which it’s spending, means the pressure on that $75 billion will be intense from day one.
Meanwhile, a Much Smaller Space IPO Already Happened
While all eyes are on the SpaceX IPO — expected to price by mid-June — another space-sector company quietly went public on the same day SpaceX filed its updated prospectus. Applied Aerospace and Defense, headquartered in Huntsville, Alabama, raised $650 million by selling 32.5 million shares at $20 each, giving it a market cap of $3.4 billion at launch.
The company supplies components for defense and space applications — propellant tanks, antennas, engine nozzles, payload adapters — and reported nearly $500 million in revenue for 2025, with space-related work accounting for less than a quarter of that figure. It posted a net loss of $49 million. Shares closed on their NYSE debut at $19.01, a drop of nearly 5% on the day — a reminder that public market enthusiasm for the space sector isn’t unconditional.
Applied Aerospace and Defense operates in a very different corner of the space economy than SpaceX: it’s a supplier, not an operator, and its scale is a fraction of its sector peers. But its listing is a signal that the broader aerospace supply chain is attracting capital market interest — even if investors are still figuring out how to price it. The contrast with the SpaceX IPO couldn’t be sharper in terms of scale and ambition.
What This Moment Actually Means for the Space Industry
The SpaceX IPO isn’t just a financial event — it’s a turning point for how the space industry is perceived by mainstream capital markets. For decades, space was a government-funded domain with limited investment appeal. SpaceX changed the commercial calculus with reusable rockets, and Starlink proved that space infrastructure could generate recurring consumer revenue. Now the SpaceX IPO is asking public markets to fund what comes next: AI at scale, orbital computing, and eventually human settlement of Mars.
Whether investors buy that vision at a $1.77 trillion valuation will say a great deal about how much the market has changed — and how much faith it’s willing to place in one man’s vision of the future. The shares going on sale represent less than 5% of the company. But the scrutiny that comes with them will be 100% public.
Source: https://spacenews.com/spacex-to-raise-at-least-75-billion-in-ipo/
