SpaceX is said to have confidentially filed for an initial public offering, setting up a potential public debut this summer ahead of other mega-IPO candidates OpenAI and Anthropic.
Founder and CEO Elon Musk has been pushing for this aggressive timetable since merging SpaceX and xAI into a $1.25 trillion tech giant. The company is reportedly looking to boost that valuation to $1.75 trillion by the time it IPOs, potentially raising up to $75 billion from the share sale.
It’s not clear at the moment which stock exchange SpaceX will choose, as it is attempting to change some of the rules regarding the time it takes for a stock to be indexed, the percentage of shares publicly available, and other long-standing requirements. The Nasdaq is reportedly in the lead, having agreed to some of SpaceX’s requests.
The company is reportedly considering a dual-class share structure, similar to those used by Alphabet, Meta, and other tech companies, to give founders extra voting power. These shares, typically Class B, are worth 10 times the Class A shares, which are usually distributed to outside investors. Given how Musk has at times railed against public markets, it seems likely he will structure SpaceX to retain voting control even with a lower overall shareholding.
What SpaceX has to offer investors
SpaceX has been a private company for a long time. Founded in 2002 by Musk, the company took six years to successfully launch a rocket. It wasn’t until 2015 that part of Musk’s mission, to make reusable rockets, was realized with the successful landing of a Falcon 9 booster.
Since then, the company has significantly improved its ability to land rockets back on Earth. It has also increased payload capacity and become the main supplier of launch services to NASA.
Starlink, which started as a side project, may be one of the key reasons to invest in SpaceX in the medium term. While being the largest orbital launch provider underpins its trillion-dollar valuation, Starlink is generating real and consistent revenue through its satellite data service.
The orbital launch business and Starlink are expected to account for the bulk of the $20 billion in revenue SpaceX is targeting in 2026.
xAI, which includes the Grok chatbot, is still generating less than $1 billion per year, while spending significantly more than that on infrastructure buildout and data center leasing. When merging, Musk made clear that there were synergies between the two companies, highlighting the potential for orbital data centers.
The mega-IPO trio
As mentioned, Musk has been pushing for SpaceX to be the first of the three mega-IPOs this year. The other two are OpenAI and Anthropic, both pure-play AI research startups. OpenAI is far ahead in the consumer market, while Anthropic has seen a surge in enterprise adoption over the past 12 months.
OpenAI recently closed the largest funding round ever, raising $122 billion at an $852 billion valuation. It will likely target a $1 trillion valuation, although it appears more hesitant than SpaceX about going public.Anthropic, the smallest of the three by valuation ($380 billion in February), is also exploring a potential IPO this year. Having both OpenAI and Anthropic on the public market may encourage smaller AI startups, such as Perplexity, Scale AI, and Mistral, to follow suit.