SpaceX, the rocket and satellite company Elon Musk founded more than two decades ago, is on the verge of becoming the most valuable company ever to go public. The company confidentially filed a draft registration statement with the Securities and Exchange Commission earlier this year, Bloomberg first reported, and people familiar with the plans say SpaceX is targeting a June 2026 listing at a valuation of roughly $1.75 trillion.
To put that in perspective: only Apple, Microsoft, Nvidia, and a few other companies currently trade at that level. SpaceX would arrive on the public markets already worth more than the vast majority of the S&P 500 combined.
The confidential filing uses a process the SEC extended to all issuers in 2017, letting companies work through regulatory comments before exposing their financials publicly. Under those rules, SpaceX must convert its confidential draft into a public filing at least 15 days before it begins a road show to pitch shares to institutional investors. If the company plans to start marketing in late spring, the prospectus would need to go public within the next two weeks, with a formal listing following in June.
Neither SpaceX nor Musk has publicly confirmed the filing, the timeline, or the valuation target. But the shift from confidential paperwork to public scrutiny will force the notoriously secretive rocket maker to open its books for the first time.
Why go public now?
SpaceX has spent years resisting the public markets. Musk has said repeatedly that he wanted to keep the company private until its Mars ambitions were further along. So what changed?
The most likely answer is a combination of employee pressure and capital needs. SpaceX has thousands of employees holding stock options and restricted equity that are difficult to liquidate through private secondary sales alone. A December 2024 tender offer valued the company at roughly $350 billion, CNBC reported, but demand for liquidity has only grown as the workforce has expanded alongside Starlink and Starship development.
At the same time, Starlink’s global buildout requires enormous ongoing capital expenditure for satellite manufacturing and launches. Going public would give SpaceX access to the deep pools of institutional money that private fundraising, no matter how successful, cannot fully replicate.
A $1.75 trillion IPO target would represent a fivefold jump from that $350 billion secondary valuation in roughly 18 months. Even by Silicon Valley standards, that leap demands serious justification.
How $1.75 trillion compares to every IPO before it
The current record holder for the largest IPO by capital raised is Saudi Aramco, which listed on the Tadawul exchange in December 2019. The base offering raised about $25.6 billion, and after underwriters exercised their overallotment option, the total grew to approximately $29.4 billion. Aramco’s market capitalization at listing was approximately $1.7 trillion.
SpaceX’s reported $1.75 trillion valuation would place it in Aramco’s neighborhood by market cap at debut. But the potential scale of the capital raise itself is what sets this apart. No source has yet disclosed how many shares SpaceX intends to offer or how much cash the deal would generate. Until the prospectus becomes public, the precise size of the raise remains unknown. Still, if SpaceX sells even a modest percentage of shares at that valuation, the total capital raised could dwarf Aramco’s record by a wide margin, potentially by an order of magnitude.
For context, the largest U.S. technology IPO remains Alibaba’s 2014 listing on the New York Stock Exchange, which raised $25 billion (including the overallotment). No American-founded company has come close to that figure, let alone what SpaceX’s numbers could look like.
Three businesses, one price tag
SpaceX is not a single business. It is at least three distinct operations, and the IPO math depends on how investors value each one.
Starlink is the revenue engine. The satellite-internet division has grown from a beta experiment into a global broadband provider serving millions of subscribers across more than 70 countries. By late 2024, the service had surpassed four million paying customers, according to company announcements, and industry analysts estimated annual revenue in the range of $6.6 billion to $7.5 billion, with margins improving as the constellation matures and per-satellite manufacturing costs decline. Those numbers have almost certainly grown since then, but the prospectus will provide the first audited look at Starlink’s actual financial performance.
“Starlink is the piece that makes the valuation math work for most institutional investors,” said Laura Forczyk, founder of the space consulting firm Astralytical. “It is a recurring-revenue business at a scale that no other space company has achieved.”
Launch services remain the company’s founding franchise. SpaceX’s Falcon 9 has become the dominant workhorse of the global launch market, with a cadence that no competitor can match. NASA, the U.S. Space Force, and commercial satellite operators all rely on it. Revenue from launch contracts is steadier and lower-margin than Starlink, but the backlog is deep and the customer base includes the most creditworthy buyers on Earth.
Starship, the fully reusable super-heavy launch vehicle still in development, is the wild card. If Starship achieves routine operation, it could slash the cost of putting mass into orbit by another order of magnitude, opening markets in space tourism, orbital manufacturing, and lunar logistics for NASA’s Artemis program. Bulls will price Starship’s potential into the IPO valuation. Skeptics will note that the vehicle has yet to complete a full mission profile and that development timelines have repeatedly slipped.
Taken together, these three pillars give SpaceX a story that spans consumer broadband, government contracting, and deep-space exploration. Whether that story justifies a $1.75 trillion price tag is the question every prospective shareholder will have to answer.
The structural questions that will shape the offering
Beyond valuation, several structural and regulatory issues will determine how the IPO plays out and how attractive it looks to institutional buyers.
Share structure and control. Musk has historically favored dual-class or multi-class share arrangements that concentrate voting power in the hands of founders and insiders. Tesla uses a single-class structure, but Musk has publicly expressed regret about that choice. If SpaceX adopts supervoting shares, public investors could own a significant economic stake with limited governance influence. Large institutional funds will scrutinize these terms closely.
National-security sensitivity. SpaceX holds classified launch contracts with the U.S. Space Force and the National Reconnaissance Office. Its Starlink constellation has been used in active conflict zones, most notably by Ukrainian forces during the war with Russia. A public listing could raise questions about foreign ownership thresholds, compliance with International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR), and whether the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) would review large block purchases by non-U.S. entities.
Musk’s bandwidth and political profile. Musk is simultaneously CEO of Tesla, owner of X (formerly Twitter), and head of xAI. He has also become one of the most politically visible business figures in the country. Investors in a newly public SpaceX will want clarity on how much of his time and attention the company commands, especially during a period when Starship development and Starlink expansion both require hands-on technical leadership. His political involvement also introduces reputational risk that institutional compliance teams will weigh when sizing positions.
Competitive landscape. SpaceX has dominated commercial launch for years, but the field is filling in. Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket completed its first flight in January 2025 and is ramping toward commercial operations. Rocket Lab continues to develop its Neutron vehicle. International competitors in China and Europe are investing heavily in reusable launch technology. On the broadband side, Amazon’s Project Kuiper is preparing to deploy its own low-Earth-orbit constellation. None of these rivals currently match SpaceX’s scale or launch cadence, but a $1.75 trillion valuation prices in continued dominance, and investors will want to understand the risks to that position.
Underwriters and exchange. Neither the lead banks nor the listing venue has been publicly disclosed. For an offering of this magnitude, the underwriting syndicate would likely include several of the largest global investment banks. Whether SpaceX chooses the NYSE or Nasdaq could signal how the company wants to be perceived: as an industrial aerospace giant or a technology platform.
Regulatory review timeline. The SEC’s Division of Corporation Finance will review SpaceX’s draft registration and issue comment letters, a back-and-forth process that can take weeks or months. IPO schedules frequently shift because of staff feedback, market volatility, or strategic recalculations by the issuer. A June 2026 target is a projection, not a locked date.
What the prospectus will finally reveal
For the next several weeks, the most reliable information will come not from anonymous sourcing but from the statutory framework itself. The SEC’s rules guarantee that before SpaceX can pitch shares on a road show, it must file its registration statement publicly, along with every prior confidential draft and every SEC comment letter. That disclosure will include audited financial statements, risk factors, executive compensation, and the specific terms of the offering.
Until that document surfaces, the $1.75 trillion figure and the June timeline remain informed projections from people close to the process, not commitments etched into a legal filing. What is firmly established is that SpaceX has taken the procedural step that separates casual IPO speculation from genuine preparation: it has engaged with the SEC on paper.
If the deal proceeds on the reported schedule, the public filing could appear as early as late May 2026, giving analysts, regulators, and retail investors their first unfiltered look at the finances of the world’s most valuable private company. For the first time, SpaceX will have to prove its valuation with numbers, not just rockets.
