A SpaceX IPO could be the biggest IPO ever! Will this endeavour of Elon Musk’s be successful?

A SpaceX IPO looks like it is on. It is not the first venture of Elon Musk’s to list, but this one could be the largest ever IPO in terms of capital raised and the value of the company, it would be over US$1tn barring a highly unlikely cut in the most recent private valuation! If it listed today, it’d be dwarfed by just 5 S&P 500 companies – Nvidia, Apple, Alphabet, Microsoft and Amazon for those wondering.

The company already boasts a list of investors headed by Google, Fidelity and Baillie Gifford, but a public listing would allow retail investors to get a slice of the company. It is not even a done deal, there have only been reports, but mere reports have led to several peers rallying.

Let’s take a step back and look at the company’s journey to this point and what the future holds.

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Overview of SpaceX

SpaceX was founded by Elon Musk way back in 2002 with a stated mission to make humanity multi-planetary. In the two decades since, the company has methodically dismantled the assumptions of the aerospace industry. It developed the first privately funded liquid-fuelled rocket to reach orbit (Falcon 1, 2008), the first commercial spacecraft to dock with the International Space Station (Dragon, 2012), and then the technology that changed the entire economics of spaceflight: the reusable orbital booster.

Today, SpaceX operates on a scale no private aerospace company has previously achieved. In 2025 alone, the company launched its Falcon 9 rocket more than 160 times – this is more than half of all launches conducted globally by any company or nation! A single Falcon 9 booster, designated B1067, has now flown and landed 32 times, with turnaround times as short as three weeks. The company hit its 500th successful booster landing last October, a milestone so far ahead of any competitor that the ‘best competitor’ (Blue Origin) has managed one.

On top of the launch business sits Starlink, SpaceX’s satellite internet constellation. Launched commercially in 2020, Starlink now serves 9.2 million subscribers across more than 150 countries, having doubled its subscriber base for two consecutive years. Morningstar estimates the segment generated roughly $10.6bn in revenue in 2025, representing approximately 67% of the company’s total top line, with EBITDA margins around 54%. Revenue growth is running above 50% annually, a trajectory more characteristic of a dominant consumer platform than a satellite operator.

A 2026 SpaceX IPO could be the greatest ever

Reports emerged this week that SpaceX is preparing to file a prospectus with the SEC as soon as this week, with a mid-June 2026 debut widely cited as the target. The numbers being discussed are without precedent in IPO history. Only a matter of weeks ago, SpaceX absorbed Musk’s artificial intelligence company xAI in an all-share deal that valued the combined entity at approximately $1.25tn. If it listed at that valuation it’d be a very big IPO, so much so it’d trail just 5 listed US stocks.

What’s more is company is targeting a valuation of approximately $1.5-1.75tn with some reports putting the potential capital raise at over $75bn. For context, the largest IPO in history to date is Saudi Aramco’s $29.4bn offering in 2019. At the higher end of current estimates, SpaceX would raise more than twice that figure in a single transaction.

Analysis by Morningstar has indicated the company plans to float roughly 3.3% of its equity to raise a $50bn war chest. Even that more conservative figure would shatter the Aramco record outright. Proceeds are expected to fund the commercial scale-up of the Starship super-heavy launch vehicle, further Starlink constellation expansion, and the company’s $19.6bn acquisition of EchoStar’s wireless spectrum, a purchase that on its own exceeds SpaceX’s full-year 2025 revenue.

On the valuation question, the honest answer is: expensive, but not obviously irrational. At $1.5 trillion, the stock would trade at ap proximately 94 times 2025 revenue. That multiple is hard to defend through a conventional aerospace or even telecom lens. But Starlink is neither. It is a near-monopoly subscription business operating globally with minimal competition, 54% EBITDA margins, and subscriber growth that has not yet shown signs of plateauing.

PitchBook’s current fair value range for SpaceX sits at $1.1-1.7 tn, suggesting the headline valuation is aggressive but within the bounds of defensible analysis: contingent on Starship commercialisation proceeding roughly on schedule. Investors should also note that SpaceX has never filed public financial statements. Until the S-1 is on file, precise modelling remains constrained.

Revenue estimates for 2026 range from $22-24bn, implying acceleration beyond 50% growth. If those figures hold, the valuation multiples compress rapidly over a two-to-three-year horizon. The bull case rests on that trajectory continuing; the bear case centres on execution risk in Starship, the governance concentration around Musk, and the xAI integration complicating an already complex business.

Ripple Effects: The Sector Rally

The space sector did not wait for the S-1 to react. On Wednesday, March 25, the mere report of an imminent IPO filing was enough to send publicly traded space stocks sharply higher. AST SpaceMobile and Rocket Lab each gained around 10%, Firefly Aerospace climbed 16% and York Space rose 5%.

The mechanism here is straightforward. The mere talks of a SpaceX IPO legitimises the sector in the eyes of generalist institutional capital. Funds that have been unable to access SpaceX as a private company could be able to do so in such an event , and that new attention flows downstream to the names they can already buy.

Intuitive Machines (LUNR) is the clearest beneficiary of this dynamic. The Houston-based lunar lander company has seen its stock rise roughly 99% over the past six months on a combination of genuine contract wins and SpaceX-adjacent sentiment. On March 25 alone, Intuitive Machines surged nearly 20% after winning a fifth lunar lander contract from NASA worth $180.4m under the Commercial Lunar Payload Services programme. The company is targeting $900m-1bn in revenue for 2026, underpinned by a $4.8nm Near Space Network contract running through 2034.

Firefly Aerospace (FLY) presents a more complicated picture. The company went public in August 2025 and its shares had fallen 48% from their offer price before this week’s rally. Firefly’s Blue Ghost lander achieved the first fully successful commercial lunar touchdown in March, and the company holds meaningful NASA contracts including a $176.7m CLPS award for a south pole mission in 2029. The SpaceX IPO tailwind helps, but Firefly’s recovery will ultimately depend on execution against its own pipeline.

The broader pattern is that the Trump administration’s emphasis on space superiority, combined with the commercial momentum SpaceX represents, has created a structural re-rating of the sector. Whether individual names deserve their current valuations is a separate question from whether the category itself is attracting durable capital flows. The evidence suggests it is.

The Bottom Line

The SpaceX IPO, if it proceeds on the reported timeline and at the reported scale, will be the largest in stock market history. The valuation is demanding and requires investors to accept significant execution risk on Starship, meaningful key-person concentration, and the unknown implications of the xAI merger. None of those risks are trivial.

What offsets those risks is a Starlink business that is already generating $7.5bn in EBITDA, growing faster than almost any comparable company at this scale, and facing no credible near-term competition. That business alone can sustain a very large valuation. The question for public market investors is whether they are willing to pay for the rest of the portfolio on top of it – the rockets, AI, lunar ambitions and orbital data centres.

For the sector, the answer to that question matters less than the act of asking it publicly. SpaceX going public brings the commercial space economy into the mainstream institutional conversation in a way it has never quite been before. That is likely to be a durable development, irrespective of where the stock trades on its first day.