SpaceX Could Make Elon Musk the World's First Trillionaire

SpaceX just filed plans for the largest stock market debut in history. The company says it will offer 555,555,555 shares at $135 each, raising up to $75 billion in its IPO. That would blow past the previous record — Saudi Aramco's $26 billion debut in 2019 — by a wide margin and give SpaceX a market valuation of $1.77 trillion.

Only six companies in the S&P 500 are currently worth more. Nvidia tops that list at $5.2 trillion.

The company plans to list on the Nasdaq under the ticker SPCX and could begin trading as soon as the end of next week.

For Elon Musk the timing is significant. Forbes currently pegs his net worth at $826 billion, with his SpaceX stake accounting for $542 billion of that — based on a previous company valuation of $1.25 trillion. The new $1.77 trillion valuation would add roughly $223 billion to his net worth, pushing him past the $1 trillion mark and making him the first person in history to reach that threshold.

Most of that wealth is on paper — stock he hasn't cashed out. But the number would be real.

The Odd Contradiction at the Center of This IPO

Here's the part that gives some investors pause. SpaceX is asking the public to value it at $1.77 trillion while simultaneously losing $2.6 billion from operations last year on $18.7 billion in revenue. The losses were still piling up at the start of this year.

That's not unusual for a company betting everything on long-term infrastructure — Amazon lost money for years before it became the most dominant retailer on earth. But it means buyers are essentially wagering on a future that hasn't materialized yet.

And what a future Musk is selling. The IPO document — described as colorful and even frightening in parts, a sharp contrast from typical dry corporate filings — lays out plans to put men back on the moon, establish a permanent human colony on Mars with at least one million inhabitants, and build data centers in space. It warns that without this kind of ambitious expansion humanity risks sharing "the same fate as the dinosaurs."

The filing also identifies potential AI revenue of up to $26.5 trillion. That number depends on space-based data centers — technology that doesn't currently exist.

The Control Question

Musk won't just be the largest shareholder. He'll hold 82.4% of the voting power in SpaceX through Class B shares that give him 10 votes per share. That means even as a public company SpaceX will operate almost entirely at Musk's direction. Investors buying in are essentially betting on his vision — with very limited ability to push back on how the company is run.

The AI Angle

SpaceX's ambitions go well beyond rockets and satellites. The filing signals a pivot toward becoming a major AI company — but the path there is complicated. Musk's AI venture xAI, which produces the chatbot Grok, launched in 2023 with 11 co-founders who have all since left, several recruited away by competitors. Industry analysts have described Grok as less impressive than offerings from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google.

SpaceX does have a computing partnership with Anthropic and recently secured the rights to acquire AI coding tool Cursor for $60 billion later this year — which would give it access to business customers currently using Claude or ChatGPT. Wedbush analyst Dan Ives expects Tesla and SpaceX to merge next year, combining the electric vehicle and robotics ambitions of Tesla with SpaceX's infrastructure.

The Bigger Picture for Markets

SpaceX's IPO isn't happening in isolation. This week Anthropic submitted a confidential SEC filing to start its own IPO process. OpenAI is widely expected to follow. After years of muted IPO activity, the biggest names in AI and space technology are all heading to public markets at roughly the same time.

"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.

Whether public markets are ready to absorb trillion-dollar loss-making companies on the promise of Mars colonies and space-based AI infrastructure is the question Wall Street is about to answer in real time.

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