The $1.75 trillion ask

SpaceX has filed to go public at $135 a share, putting ~555 million shares on the market for about $75 billion and the whole company at over $1.75 trillion. That is the largest IPO ever filed — roughly three times what Saudi Aramco raised to set the prior record in 2019 — for under 5% of the firm.

Growth depends on "unproven technologies or technologies that do not exist." — SpaceX's IPO prospectus

The arithmetic is the story. SpaceX makes money from two things, rockets and Starlink, which together turn over something like $15 billion a year while the company posts net losses near $5 billion. So the $1.75 trillion price works out to about 94 times trailing revenue, against roughly 23x for Nvidia and 5x for Aramco at its own listing. To justify the gap, the S-1 declares a $28.5 trillion addressable market — and 93% of it is artificial intelligence, a business SpaceX has barely entered. The space and connectivity it actually sells are under 7% of the market it claims.

The filing is candid about what it is buying with that number: growth, it says, depends on 'unproven technologies or technologies that do not exist.' Musk keeps roughly five-sixths of the voting power through super-voting shares, so the public buys economics without control. Morningstar puts fair value near $780 billion, less than half the ask. And on June 4, S&P Dow Jones declined to fast-track the stock into the S&P 500 — it cannot pass the basic test of four straight profitable quarters, even as it requests the highest IPO valuation in history.

When it lists on Nasdaq as SPCX, retail will be able to own SpaceX for the first time. What they will be pricing is not a rocket company but the market's appetite to underwrite an AI future on a space company's balance sheet.