Elon Musk’s SpaceX Files For Historic Nasdaq IPO

For over two decades, SpaceX stayed firmly out of public markets. While competitors listed and delisted, Elon Musk's rocket company kept growing quietly and profitably, for a time without ever having to answer to quarterly earnings calls or public shareholders. 

That changed on 20th May 2026, when SpaceX filed its S-1 prospectus with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, setting the stage for what is widely expected to be the largest initial public offering in history.

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The company disclosed plans to list its shares on the Nasdaq and Nasdaq Texas under the ticker symbol "SPCX."

The Scale of What Is Being Offered

As per Yahoo Finance, the Elon Musk-led rocket and satellite company is said to be targeting a valuation of about $1.7 trillion and could raise more than $80 billion. At that size, the offering would surpass Saudi Aramco’s 2019 IPO, which raised about $26 billion. 

The company outlined a potential revenue opportunity it described as totalling $28.5 trillion, which SpaceX called "the largest actionable total addressable market in human history." Whether that claim holds up to scrutiny is another matter, but it gives a sense of how the company is positioning itself ahead of the listing.

Revenue Is Growing. So Are the Losses

SpaceX generated $18.7 billion in revenue in 2025, up roughly 33% from $14.1 billion in 2024. However, after posting a profit of $791 million in 2024, the company swung to a net loss of $4.9 billion in 2025. The losses have not eased going into 2026 either. In the first quarter of 2026 alone, SpaceX posted a net loss of $4.3 billion on revenue of $4.7 billion, compared to a net loss of $528 million on $4.07 billion in revenue during the same period a year earlier.

The accumulated deficit on the balance sheet tells its own story. By 31st March 2026, that figure had reached $41.3 billion.

The question investors will be wrestling with is whether these losses are a warning sign or simply the cost of building something at this scale. SpaceX's position is that the spending is deliberate and strategic, not a sign of a company struggling to manage costs.

SpaceX’s Expansion Comes At A Huge Cost

SpaceX spent $20.7 billion in 2025 alone, including $12.7 billion on AI projects, $4.2 billion on its Starlink satellite network, and $3.8 billion on rockets and other space ventures. In Q1 2026, total capital expenditure came in at $10.1 billion, with $7.72 billion of that attributed to artificial intelligence; a figure that dwarfs what most AI-focused companies spend in an entire year.

A significant part of the AI spending relates to the February 2026 acquisition of xAI: Musk's artificial intelligence company  which has now been folded into SpaceX. The AI segment is expanding massive compute infrastructure, including Colossus data centres, and has secured major third-party commitments.

Starlink: The Business That Funds Everything Else

Buried inside SpaceX's filing is the one segment that is actually making money: Starlink. The Starlink business accounts for more than two-thirds of revenue and earned $1.2 billion in profit in the most recent quarter. With 10.3 million subscribers, Starlink brought in $3.3 billion in Q1 2026 and $11.4 billion across the whole of 2025.

Subscriber numbers have grown sharply from 2.3 million in 2023 to 4.4 million in 2024, before reaching 8.9 million by the end of 2025. The satellite internet service now operates across 164 countries, with over 9,600 satellites in orbit. In essence, Starlink is currently the financial engine keeping the broader operation afloat while SpaceX pours capital into rockets, AI infrastructure, and long-term ambitions.

Control Stays With Musk

One aspect of the filing that has attracted considerable attention is the share structure. SpaceX has proposed a super-voting share plan that would allow Elon Musk to retain control of the company after the listing. Under the proposed structure, 85.1% of the company's voting power sat with the controlling shareholder ahead of the IPO.

This is not unusual for founder-led technology companies: Meta, Google, and Snap all listed with similar dual-class structures, but it does mean that public shareholders will have limited ability to influence major decisions at the company.

What Investors Are Looking Forward To?

SpaceX today is not simply a rocket company. It is a conglomerate that spans satellite internet, launch services, artificial intelligence, and social media (X, formerly Twitter, is now part of the group). The filing provided the first official look at the financials behind the much-hyped rocket maker that has been around since 2002, as well as at several other businesses that Musk has folded into the company.

Nasdaq's revised rules could allow a mega-IPO to enter the Nasdaq-100 after just 15 days, bringing passive fund pressure into the stock much earlier than older inclusion rules would have permitted. That has implications for how quickly the stock gets absorbed into index funds and ETFs and for how volatile the early trading period might be.

If Starlink continues to scale, Starship becomes commercially viable, and the AI bet pays off, the numbers could eventually justify the price tag. If any of those pillars wobble, the losses sitting on the balance sheet will matter a great deal more than the mission statements in the prospectus.

What is beyond doubt is that this is one of the more unusual public offerings in recent memory, a company selling a vision of the future as much as it is selling a stake in a business.