SpaceX's $1.75 Trillion IPO Is the Biggest in History — So Why Does It Need You?

Pull up a chair.

Your group chat is about to fill up with SpaceX IPO takes.

Most will be meh.

Today, we give you the receipts.

Coffee at the ready…

The SpaceX IPO will test whether hype can carry a $1.75 trillion price tag. SpaceX filed its S-1 confidentially on Tuesday — $75 billion raised, a June listing, the biggest IPO in human history. Musk is reserving 30% of shares for retail investors, triple the norm.

The company is extraordinary. But extraordinary companies can still be overpriced.

The numbers first.

SpaceX did roughly $16 billion in revenue last year, growing at around 50% annually. At a $1.75 trillion valuation, buyers are still paying more than 100 times sales. Growth explains some of the premium.

It doesn't explain all of it — not in a market shaken by war in Iran and petrol above $4 a gallon.

And the company going public is not the SpaceX you remember.

In February, Musk folded xAI and X (formerly Twitter) into SpaceX. The pitch: Grok AI models running on Starlink's satellite network, powering orbital data centres. If it works, it's a vertically integrated AI stack no competitor can touch. It's also months old, unproven, and the xAI unit is burning cash with close to zero market share against OpenAI.

Nobody knows if these pieces belong in the same building, let alone the same stock ticker.

Any prospectus worth reading would flag this next part.

SpaceX has banked $24.4 billion in federal contracts since 2008. It remains NASA's only ride to the International Space Station. Government revenue concentration is a standard red flag for public companies — and this one carries extra baggage. Musk spent months at DOGE reviewing spending at the very agencies where SpaceX is a major vendor. His companies collected $6.3 billion from those agencies in 2024 alone, and not one Musk contract was cut. SpaceX may well deserve every dollar.

But public shareholders will need to decide how much political risk they're pricing in — and the S-1 should make the dependency crystal clear.

Nasdaq, meanwhile, cleared the path.

Its new "Fast Entry" rule kicks in on 1 May — mega-cap IPOs can join the Nasdaq-100 in 15 trading days instead of three months.

SpaceX reportedly made fast inclusion a condition for choosing Nasdaq over the NYSE. Once inside, every ETF tracking the benchmark has to buy more than $30 trillion in passive assets…

Forced to bid.

Pro: SpaceX runs 80% of US orbital launches, Starlink has no real competitor until Amazon's Kuiper scales, and revenue is growing 50% a year. This is infrastructure monopoly pricing, not meme-stock nonsense.

Con: A 100x price-to-sales ratio, a Frankenstein conglomerate, and dual-class shares giving Musk ~80% voting power mean retail investors get the risk but not the steering wheel.

Our read: The rockets are real. The valuation is a trust fall. Know the difference before you open your brokerage app.

[Analysis] Axios — "SpaceX's monster IPO is unlike anything we've seen"

Four ways this listing breaks precedent: size, structure, Musk risk, and xAI's red ink.

Why it matters: The only sober pre-S-1 briefing worth your minutes.

112x revenue. SpaceX's price-to-sales ratio at IPO.

(Motley Fool)

CNBC — Oracle cuts up to 30,000 jobs to fund AI data centres — Profits up 27%. Headcount down 18%. The new corporate maths: fire the humans, buy the GPUs.

Yahoo Finance — Nasdaq rewrites its own rules for mega-cap IPOs — A rule built for one company. Nasdaq won't say which. (It's SpaceX.)

Tech Startups — OpenAI closes $122 billion funding round at $852 billion valuation — The AI arms race now runs on capital, not code. The moat is your chequebook.

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For the love of coffee, see you tomorrow!

Enjoy your Thursday, keep it caffeinated.

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SpaceX might be the best company to go public this decade.

It might also be the most expensive.

We'd want to see the S-1 before we bet our own money.

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