SpaceX's long anticipated IPO filing is out now - here's the highlights

Investors have been waiting years for Elon Musk's SpaceX to test the public market waters, with the long-awaited IPO promising to be one of the biggest of all time. It's starting to look go for launch.

On Wednesday, SpaceX filed its Form S-1 with the Securities and Exchange Commission, kicking off its journey to Wall Street. Analysts say that SpaceX could seek to raise up to $80 billion at a $1.7 trillion valuation, which would make it the world's biggest IPO ever, surpassing Saudi Aramco's 2019 IPO.

That higher valuation comes just months after SpaceX was valued at $1.25 trillion after a merger with Musk's AI startup, xAI.

However, despite evident excitement around the company's market debut, there are a few things that investors should know.

What does SpaceX do?

SpaceX holds an unimpeachable lead in the commercial space race, one which is unlikely to be closed by peers such as Blue Origin or Rocket Lab. It has launched over 650 missions over its two-decade history, accelerated by its reusable Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets.

However, in the last few years, SpaceX has diversified away from being a launch company alone. It has become a diversified space, connectivity, and software company through entries into new markets and acquisitions; some of those acquisitions have even included Musk's other ventures.

Earlier this year, it acquired xAI, which itself had acquired the ailing social media giant of the same name last year. It has also spent billions to stand up a satellite internet constellation called Starlink. But above all else, its future might well be tied to the prospects for its next generation rocket, Starship, which it hopes will fly to Mars by the end of the decade.

Growth is the focus, not profits

SpaceX's strong brand and association with CEO Elon Musk could ultimately set it up to surpass a $2 trillion valuation in its debut. However, the firm's various new ventures are also the reason why the company is unprofitable.

That was not the case in 2024, when the company reported a basic net income profit. However, with the company's forays into new business verticals like AI, unprofitability might become the norm.

Capital expenditures in its AI segment alone were over 7x higher than its one-time core Space segment. That's unlikely to change anytime soon, either. The result is that the company is burning through money, even despite some segment-level EBITDA profitability:

• Q1 Revenue: $4.694 billion
  
  Connectivity (Starlink) Revenue: $3.257 billion AI (xAI) Revenue: $818 million Space Revenue: $619 million

• Q1 Pro Forma Net Loss: -$4.382 billion
  
  Adjusted EBITDA: $1.127 billion Connectivity Segment Adjusted EBITDA: $2.087 billion AI Segment Adjusted EBITDA: $818 million Space Segment Adjusted EBITDA: -$351 million

As a result, investors considering buying into the company will be buying into a firm that views itself still in growth mode. In the short to intermediate term, that is SpaceX's Starship rocket.

Starship is the biggest risk

In the company's S-1, it details the biggest risk to its business: its in-development Starship rocket, which it hopes will deliver larger payloads to orbit and eventually take human space travelers to the Moon and Mars.

In its risk, it warns that failure or delay in Starship development "would delay or limit our ability to execute our growth strategy" and "could materially adversely affect our business, financial condition, results of operations, and future prospects."

However, even after Starship, the company is fixated on other pockets of growth opportunity. In other words, it might be many years before profits come. For many investors, that is okay though, since fundamentals are completely out the window with this one.

What justifies the valuation then?

What investors are buying into right now is a story; the promise of what could be. In its filing, SpaceX touts having the "largest actionable total addressable market in human history." It calls out enterprise applications, AI infrastructure, and other businesses as its largest pockets of opportunity.

Like Musk's electric vehicle company Tesla, investors aren't going to be buying on fundamentals. They'll be buying into what SpaceX could grow into. In its filing, it calls out areas of opportunities such as "orbital AI compute", "digital human augmentation", and a "lunar economy," among other things.

The tall tales continue in a section called "future markets", where the company says it might expand into "in-orbit manufacturing", "space tourism", and "asteroid mining." It's not obvious over what horizon that "future" would be possible, as these industries are currently more works of science fiction than opportunity.

SpaceX is Musk, which is a risk

In its risk factors, the company also calls out CEO Elon Musk as a possible risk. After the company goes public, it will be designated a "controlled company" because of Musk's enormous ownership of the company. This will exempt the company from various corporate governance requirements.

In other words, Musk is free to do as he pleases. He will not only serve as CEO, CTO, and Chairman of the Board, but will boast a combined voting power of 85.1% from his enormous ownership (93.6%) of Class B stock.

The company observes that its dependence on Musk could affect its ability to execute, or could affect its brand, but all things considered, SpaceX is Musk and Musk is SpaceX. They add: "This will limit or preclude your ability to influence corporate matters and the election of our directors."

Why investors might steer clear

At the nearly $2 trillion valuation that SpaceX-xAI could ultimately seek, investors aren't paying for cash flow or profits, they are buying a lotto ticket. SpaceX is pumping its valuation to capitalize on FOMO, plain and simple.

The premium asked by SpaceX is historic, and likely detrimental to a market which has become comfortable with passive market cap-weighted indexes. In the last few weeks, we've dug into how so-called mega IPOs could create rockiness in the market. As the entirety of SpaceX's price discovery has happened in the private markets, its arrival on Wall Street is likely to have happened after most of its real appreciation.

This is especially problematic for investors who are holding Nasdaq ETFs, which will be buying the company just days after it hits the market.

However, SpaceX won't be the last mega IPO to test the market (and its desire for hot plays in AI, space, and industrial tech.) These same rules will apply to firms like OpenAI and Anthropic, also unprofitable firms which have been reliant on the drip of venture capital money to stay afloat as they pursue trillion-dollar valuations of their own ahead of their trip to ring the opening bell.

Cumulatively, the firms could be worth over $3 trillion, a price set by private investors and rushed to market. It could work out for American investors. But all things considered, we've never seen anything like this before. There is a very real chance, candidly, that it simply will not. In that case, Americans lose. The elite win.

Investors should consider whether the story is compelling enough to cover for the lack of fundamentals, or bubbly promises about the future which might double as moving goal posts.

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This story was originally published May 20, 2026 at 3:05 PM.