SpaceX's $1.75T IPO & The Bet That Could Reshape Public Markets

Welcome to Memorandum Deep Dives. In this series, we go beyond the headlines to examine the decisions shaping our digital future. 🗞️

This week, the series turns to SpaceX’s planned IPO: a $75B raise at a valuation of up to $1.75T, a scale that would eclipse Saudi Aramco’s $29.4B record by more than 2.5 times and test the limits of what public markets can absorb.

At first glance, this looks like a familiar story, a dominant private rocket company going public at an enormous valuation. But SpaceX is not listed as a launch provider. It is coming to market as a conglomerate spanning satellite internet, defense, artificial intelligence, and social media, priced at roughly 109 times revenue on the strength of a largely unproven narrative.

What is at stake is structural. The market’s response will determine whether speculative, triple-digit revenue multiples become normalized for companies like OpenAI and Anthropic, or whether a weaker debut forces a broader repricing across late-stage tech.

How SpaceX’s IPO may set the new global benchmark for tech valuations

Amid the constant flow of information from tech circles, it’s easy to overlook the implications of some of the leading headlines. One such news story, though, that is covered intently but fails to highlight its impact on the business atmosphere, both in contemporary and future trends, is the upcoming SpaceX IPO.

In April 2026, SpaceX filed a confidential registration statement with the SEC targeting a $75B raise at a valuation of up to $1.75T, with a Nasdaq listing planned for June. To put that in proportion, Saudi Aramco’s 2019 offering of $29.4B holds the current record, making SpaceX’s target more than 2.5 times larger than anything the public markets have absorbed before. The company’s roadshow is expected to begin in June, and CFO Bret Johnsen has told the 21-bank syndicate that retail investors would represent “a bigger part than any IPO in history,” with roughly 30% of shares earmarked for individual buyers.

The sheer scale of the offering makes it significant, but the valuation is what makes it consequential. At approximately 109 times its 2025 revenue of $15B to $16B, SpaceX would debut at a price-to-sales multiple nearly four times higher than Meta commanded at its 2012 IPO, despite growing more slowly. The way the market responds to that number will not stay contained to one stock: it will recalibrate what investors are willing to pay for every ambitious tech company lining up behind it.

What investors are actually buying

Part of what makes the pricing so difficult to evaluate is that SpaceX is no longer just a rocket company. In February 2026, it acquired Musk’s AI startup xAI in the largest merger of all time, a deal valued at $1.25T that folded xAI’s Grok chatbot, the social media platform X, and xAI’s data center operations into the SpaceX corporate structure. Anyone buying shares in June is buying into a conglomerate that spans satellite internet, reusable rockets, defense contracting, artificial intelligence, and social media, all under one ticker.

The financial core holding this together is Starlink, SpaceX’s satellite internet service. Starlink generated approximately $11.4B in 2025 revenue with a 63% Earnings Before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation, and Amortization (EBITDA) margin and reached 10M subscribers by February 2026, making it the only profitable segment of the combined company.

On the other side of the ledger, xAI is burning roughly $1B per month, and the orbital data center concept that Musk has framed as the merger’s strategic rationale, which entails deploying AI computing infrastructure in space powered by solar energy, remains entirely theoretical.

As such, investors aren’t paying for what works today; they’re betting that the big, unproven vision will pay off, and that’s what makes the valuation so uncertain and controversial.

This makes it difficult for existing valuation methods to work well for companies like SpaceX that combine a real business with big, unproven ambitions.

Analysts say the numbers don’t make sense on current performance alone and require investors to believe in future technologies that haven’t been fully revealed yet.

Tim Farrar of TMF Associates described SpaceX’s pricing as similar to Tesla’s: numbers that “just don’t fit traditional metrics.” Chris Musey of Northern Sky Research went further, noting that launch and broadband forecasts alone cannot justify the price, and that the valuation requires belief in “additional technologies and businesses that have not yet been fully disclosed.”

This means that SpaceX’s pricing is not really a bet on satellite broadband margins or launch cadence. It is a bet on a narrative: that combining xAI’s models with Starlink’s global satellite system will create a new category of space-based AI computing. If investors accept that thesis and the stock holds, it validates a model where speculative long-term ambitions can command triple-digit revenue multiples as long as the underlying company has a proven cash-generating core.

If they reject it, the repricing will ripple outward to every late-stage private company preparing to go public at venture-era valuations, including names like OpenAI and Anthropic.

The passive money problem

Beyond the IPO itself, SpaceX is forcing a structural reckoning over how public markets absorb new entrants. The S&P 500 currently requires companies to have been publicly traded for at least 12 months before becoming eligible for inclusion, but S&P Dow Jones Indices is reportedly considering shortening that requirement. Nasdaq has gone further, circulating a proposal that would allow large IPOs to enter the Nasdaq-100 just 15 trading days after listing, waiving existing liquidity rules entirely.

The stakes behind these rule changes are enormous. Approximately $24T in assets are tied to the S&P 500 through passive index funds and ETFs. When a company enters the index, those funds must buy shares to maintain tracking, creating a wave of forced purchasing that can push prices higher regardless of fundamentals.

Fast-tracking SpaceX would mean that retirement savers in 401(k) plans and target-date funds automatically become SpaceX shareholders at whatever price the market sets during the IPO’s earliest and most volatile trading days.

Acadian Asset Management argued that for giant-cap IPOs, seasoning periods should be longer, not shorter, because price discovery is harder and the consequences of a chaotic inclusion are larger. Whatever precedent is set here will also govern how OpenAI, Anthropic, and every future mega-cap listing enters the passive investment ecosystem.

What this settles, and what it leaves open

SpaceX is not arriving alone, because OpenAI and Anthropic are both planning to go public in the second half of 2026, and together the three companies could need more money from investors in a single year than the entire U.S. IPO market raised over the prior decade. That makes SpaceX the first through the door. Its reception will shape everything that follows: a strong debut could pull other long-delayed listings into the open and restart a pipeline that has been stalled for years. At the same time, a weak one could close the window entirely, something CU Boulder finance professor Shaun Davies has warned could “effectively shut down the IPO market for the rest of 2026 and into 2027.”

Before any of that plays out, investors will get their first real look at SpaceX’s books when the S-1 prospectus lands in late May, forcing the company to publicly disclose how it accounted for the xAI merger, how much of its government revenue comes from classified defense contracts that cannot be independently verified, and the exact terms of a dual-class share structure that gives Musk outsized voting control even as his economic ownership shrinks.

These are not abstract governance concerns because they determine how much visibility outside shareholders actually have into the company’s operations and strategy, and whether the premium investors are paying reflects genuine confidence or simply the absence of information that might change their minds.

SpaceX has spent 24 years defying conventional expectations about what a rocket company can become, and the IPO will test whether public market investors are willing to pay for that track record at a price without precedent for a company of this scale. This will set the tone for how aggressively every tech company behind it in the listing queue can price itself, and how much risk ordinary investors ultimately absorb as a result.