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New York — SpaceX says it 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 — the world’s richest person — on course to becoming the first trillionaire.
The company, formally known as Space Exploration Technologies Corp., said Wednesday it will offer exactly 555,555,555 shares at $135 apiece in an initial public offering, French news agency AFP reports. The estimated proceeds would easily top the $26 billion raised by oil giant Saudi Aramco in 2019. The offering would also give SpaceX a market value of $1.77 trillion. Only six companies in the S&P 500 are currently worth more, with Nvidia tops at $5.2 trillion.
Besides the size of the offering and the expected proceeds, SpaceX’s amended prospectus updates details about how much control of the company Musk will have. As SpaceX’s CEO, chief technical officer and chairman, Musk’s voting power will come primarily through his ownership of 5.22 billion Class B shares that give the holder 10 votes for every share held. According to the filing, Musk would have 82.4% of the voting power in the company.
Forbes currently values Musk’s net worth at $826 billion and his stake in SpaceX at $542 billion. The estimated value of his SpaceX holdings was based on an overall value for the company of $1.25 trillion. Based on those numbers, a $1.77 trillion valuation for SpaceX would boost Musk’s net worth by $223 billion, making him a trillionaire. However, much of Musk’s worth is in stock that he has yet to cash in.
Even as it makes a bid for a blockbuster market debut, SpaceX is currently losing billions of dollars a year. The filing shows that the company lost $2.6 billion from operations last year on $18.7 billion in revenue, and the losses kept piling up at the start of this year as well.
Time will tell how SpaceX fares on the market. Musk’s plans for the company are as fantastical as the money he hopes raise in the sale.
Colorful, even frightening in parts, the IPO document strikes a contrast with the typically dry, technical prose in IPO documents, detailing plans to use proceeds from the sale to help put men on the moon again and perhaps even Mars. In one section, it talks of a need to build “a permanent human colony” on the red planet with “at least one million inhabitants” as existential threats loom that could consign man to “the same fate as the dinosaurs.”
Musk has almost equally ambitious plans for his other publicly traded company, Tesla. His goal is to transform the maker of electric vehicles into a producer of robotaxis and humanoid robots.
Dan Ives of Wedbush Securities wrote in a research note that he expects Tesla and SpaceX to merge next year.
AI’s possibly pivotal role
Key to the success of both companies – and any merged entity – is artificial intelligence. In its IPO filing, SpaceX says it sees potential revenue from AI of up to $26.5 trillion. But that depends on another lofty Musk ambition – putting data centers in space, which isn’t technologically possible at the moment.
Transforming his space company into a primarily AI-focused company will be a challenge for Musk, who started xAI in 2023 with 11 other co-founders who have all since left. Some were recruited away by rivals.
Its main AI product, the chatbot Grok, is “less impressive than anything that we see from any other major player in the space, whether that’s OpenAI, or Anthropic, or (Google’s) Gemini,” said IDC analyst Arnal Dayaratna.
Dayaratna said that doesn’t mean SpaceX doesn’t have potential as a major AI player, thanks in part to its computing partnership with Anthropic and Musk’s recent deal that gave SpaceX the rights to buy AI coding tool Cursor for $60 billion later this year. Folding in Cursor’s capabilities would give SpaceX access to the coveted business customers now using Anthropic’s Claude or OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
SpaceX plans to use the net proceeds from the IPO to fund the expansion of infrastructure for its AI and rocket businesses and to beef up the constellation of satellites that power Starlink Mobile, among other investments.
“The AI trade continues to roar, just in time for SpaceX’s IPO next week,” AFP quotes Kathleen Brooks, research director at the brokerage firm XTB in London as saying.
The company plans to list on the Nasdaq under the symbol “SPCX” and could begin trading as soon as the end of next week.
Anthropic also on IPO track and OpenAI may be
And SpaceX isn’t the only colossal market debut investors are now bracing for. Earlier this week, Anthropic submitted a confidential filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission to officially start its own IPO clock.
OpenAI hasn’t reported filing the initial SEC paperwork yet, but an IPO from the ChatGPT maker is widely expected.
“This listing represents the first major test for public markets after years of muted IPO activity with SpaceX paving the way for AI giants Anthropic and OpenAI to follow soon after,” Ives wrote.
