SpaceX is gearing up to attempt something Wall Street has never quite seen: a $75 billion IPO that could dwarf the combined proceeds of U.S. public offerings across two entire years.
The aerospace company wants to go public at a $1.75 trillion valuation, which would make it instantly more valuable than Walmart, Exxon Mobil, or Meta. The ambition alone signals a departure from conventional IPO strategy. But the real story isn't just the numbers. It's what SpaceX is actually selling investors, and whether the market is prepared to buy it.
CEO Elon Musk has reportedly carved out up to 30 percent of the offering for individual retail investors, triple the typical allocation. That's unusual enough. But what's happening inside the company is even stranger.
The Newly Formed Question MarkSpaceX isn't going public as the company it was five years ago. Musk recently merged his AI startup xAI into the rocket manufacturer, and before that, he absorbed X (formerly Twitter) into xAI. Those 11 xAI cofounders have all left the combined entity.
No one knows if these combinations will actually work. The merger synergies exist largely in theory. And Musk's stated vision of one million orbital data centers remains untested. Traditional IPO investors get a window into a company's established track record, but that historical data tells them little about what SpaceX is becoming.
The financial picture is murkier still. SpaceX's overall numbers remain undisclosed, and the initial filing will likely be confidential. What is known: xAI, the unit losing money at scale, is burning cash on GPUs like every other large language model startup trying to compete. Whether investors care depends on whether they continue treating AI as a sector where losses don't matter. This could be the first major test of that thesis.
Then there's Musk himself. He hasn't taken a company public since Tesla in 2010, back when he was relatively quiet on social media and had just sent his first tweet. Today's version of Musk operates under no such restraint.
IPO regulations require careful management of what company insiders publicly say. Google's cofounders nearly derailed that offering with comments made in a Playboy interview decades ago. Musk runs a social media platform, posts constantly, and has faced SEC scrutiny before. Reports suggest the commission is preparing to settle an alleged 2022 securities law violation, and the current SEC enforcement environment is notably lax.
The outcome could reshape how other major private companies evaluate going public this year. OpenAI and Anthropic are both considering IPOs, and whatever happens with SpaceX will set expectations for the entire sector. If the market swallows a $1.75 trillion valuation for a merged rocket company, AI startup, and social platform with unclear financial performance and a mercurial leader, it sends a signal. If it balks, the implications ripple across the startup world just as quickly.
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