All views expressed in this article are solely those of the author and have not been independently verified.
When trading opens on the Nasdaq on June 12 under the ticker SPCX, investors will be asked to value Space Exploration Technologies at roughly US$1.75 trillion. At a target of about US$135 a share for some 556 million shares, the offering aims to raise close to US$75 billion,
comfortably the largest initial public offering (IPO), where a company offers its shares for sale to the public for the first time) ever attempted, dwarfing Saudi Aramco’s US$29 billion debut in 2019.
The numbers invite awe, and a good deal of the commentary has obliged. But an IPO is not a coronation, it is a transaction. The newly filed prospectus gives the public its first audited look inside a company that has spent twenty-four years as one of the most consequential and most
opaque enterprises in the world. It rewards careful reading, because what SpaceX is selling is more complicated than the rockets suggest.
Three companies wearing one logo
It is tempting to think of SpaceX as a rocket company. It is more accurate to think of it as three businesses bolted together, each at a very different stage of life.
The first is Space, the launch business that built the brand. It flies satellites and cargo, carries astronauts for NASA, and holds national-security contracts with the U.S. government. In 2025, it generated roughly US$4 billion in revenue. It also lost money, to the tune of about US$657
million, as the company poured cash into developing Starship, its next-generation vehicle.
The second is Connectivity, essentially Starlink, the low-Earth-orbit satellite internet network that began commercial service in 2019. This is the part that pays the bills. Starlink produced about US$11.4 billion in revenue in 2025, around 61 percent of the company’s total, and roughly
US$4.4 billion in operating profit. It was the only segment that made money. By the end of March 2026, it served 10.3 million subscribers, up from 2.3 million just three years earlier, over a constellation of more than 10,000 satellites.
The third, and newest, is AI, the xAI business (including the Grok assistant and the former Twitter, now X), folded into SpaceX through a merger. It generated about US$3.2 billion in revenue in 2025 and lost some US$6.35 billion. This is the segment that turns an otherwise
profitable enterprise into a loss-making one, and it is the segment a prospective shareholder must scrutinize most closely.
From near-bankruptcy to near-monopoly
The historical record is genuinely remarkable, and it explains the faith the market is extending. Founded in 2002, SpaceX nearly died in its infancy. There were three consecutive failures of its small Falcon 1 rocket between 2006 and 2008, which brought it within days of insolvency. The fourth flight, in September 2008, reached orbit, the first privately funded liquid-fuelled rocket to do so, and a US$1.6 billion NASA resupply contract that December, kept the lights on.
What followed reshaped an industry. The Falcon 9 first flew in 2010. In 2012, the Dragon capsule became the first commercial spacecraft to reach the International Space Station. In December 2015, SpaceX landed an orbital-class booster upright for the first time, and in 2017, it
reflew a recovered one, and the breakthroughs in reusability that collapsed launch costs and made the rest possible. By 2020, it was flying NASA astronauts, and by 2025, it accounted for more than 80 percent of all mass humanity put into orbit.
This is the positive case, or in financial market speak, the bull case in a single sentence. SpaceX is a company that has repeatedly done what established aerospace said was impossible, and that now dominates a market it has largely created.
What the prospectus actually shows
The current picture is more textured. Consolidated revenue reached US$18.7 billion in 2025, up about 33 percent on the prior year, strong growth at considerable scale. Yet the company reported a loss from operations of roughly US$2.6 billion and a net loss of about US$4.9 billion.
This is the central tension a buyer must contemplate. The core launch-and-Starlink machine is a cash-generative, market-leading franchise. Bolted onto it is an AI venture burning capital at a rate that, for now, overwhelms those profits. The company also carries some US$29 billion in debt, including a US$20 billion bridge loan used to retire xAI’s obligations, and is committing to enormous future spending, such as a semiconductor joint venture with Tesla alone, [which] contemplates capital expenditure that could run into the tens of billions.
There are softer signals worth noting, too. Starlink’s growth, while still impressive, is maturing. Revenue per user has fallen roughly 18 percent over two years as the company has traded price for volume, and consolidated revenue growth slowed to about 15 percent in the first
quarter of 2026. Elon Musk himself has reportedly warned of a “genuine risk of bankruptcy” should Starship fail to reach a sustainable flight cadence.
The price of the ticket and the absence of a vote
Two further issues deserve any serious reader’s attention. The first is valuation. A roughly US$1.75 trillion price tag implies a multiple of earnings that sits far above established public peers, and rests heavily on a forecast, chiefly that the AI segment will, in time, become a profit centre rather than a drain. The company’s own filing cites a total addressable market it values at US$28.5 trillion, most of it in AI. Such figures describe an opportunity, not a guarantee. Where there is this much enthusiasm, there is also the risk that price has run ahead of fundamentals. One prominent commentator has mused that shares could open at a US$4 trillion valuation in a “1999-style” frenzy, a comparison that should reassure no one.
The second is control. After the offering, Musk is expected to hold roughly 42 percent of the economic interest but about 85 percent of the voting power, having recently been granted a billion performance-based shares. In plain terms, public shareholders would buy exposure to the
company’s fortunes while ceding almost any say over its direction. For investors who believe Musk’s judgement is the company’s single greatest asset, that is a positive feature. For those uneasy about key-man risk and the concentration of power in one person across several entangled ventures, it is a material concern. Both views can be held honestly.
A measured conclusion
None of this is an argument against SpaceX, and none of it is advice to buy or to avoid. It is an argument for clear eyes. The company is, by almost any operational measure, an extraordinary success, a genuine engineering and commercial achievement that has changed what is
possible. It is also being brought to market at a historic price, carrying a loss-making AI bet, significant debt, and a governance structure that asks shareholders to trust rather than to vote.
The rocket and the satellite business are real, profitable and dominant. The valuation and the AI ambitions are a wager on a future that has not yet arrived. A prudent reader of the prospectus will separate the two, decide for themselves what each is worth, and resist the gravitational pull
of the headline number. The largest IPO in history deserves at least that much skepticism and that much respect. Maybe SpaceX will not hold that title for long as Open AI (ChatGPT) and Anthropic (Claude), the mega AI companies, are also expected to launch IPOs in 2026.
Professor C. Justin Robinson is Pro Vice-Chancellor and Principal, The UWI Five Islands Campus.
