Elon Musk’s SpaceX is set to surpass $1trillion (equivalent of £751billion) its planned public listing. SpaceX, which makes rockets, space exploration technology and Starlink satellites, is privately held with Musk as premium holder of shares.
However, the firm last week made a confidential filing with authorities for an Initial Public Offering (IPO), which would allow its shares to be traded on the stock market. Musk’s own holding in SpaceX would put the billionaire on track to become the world’s first trillionaire. As reported by Bloomberg, Reuters and the New York Times, the company is aiming to officially go public in June.
A confidential IPO filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission allows a company to avoid immediately revealing information to the public while it requests feedback from the regulator. The next step will be for the firm’s executives to hold a “roadshow” – meetings with big investors to convince them to buy shares.
By making shares of SpaceX available for purchase by the public, the company is looking to raise $50bn or more, according to reports. Earlier this year, SpaceX took over xAI, Musk’s artificial intelligence venture. After that all-stock merger, SpaceX is believed to have become the most valuable private company in the world, with an internal valuation of $1.25tn. Recently, Musk’s various companies have been becoming increasingly intertwined.
Last year, xAI, best known for its chatbot Grok, took over X, the social media platform previously known as Twitter that Musk bought in 2022. Emily Zheng, a senior analyst at Pitchbook, told the BBC that by bringing xAI under SpaceX, Musk could show potential investors that he was consolidating costs and able to easily share resources between his companies.
With its large-scale ambitions, SpaceX is in need of a massive cash infusion that going public can provide, Zheng added. The company is racing to keep up with the “sheer cost of compute, infrastructure, and energy” needed to expand, she said. Earlier this year, Tesla, Musk’s electric vehicle company, revealed it had invested more than $2bn in xAI.
The billionaire said a significant share of Tesla’s manufacturing would begin to shift toward building robots, which would make use of xAI technology like Grok. Grok is already included in some Teslas as an AI assistant. SpaceX would also partner with Tesla and xAI in the massive chipmaking endeavour Musk announced last month, which he is calling Terafab.
“Tesla, xAI and SpaceX have all done amazing things that people did not think could be done before,” Musk said in a March presentation discussing Terafab. Musk started SpaceX in 2002 with the aim of reducing the cost of launching crafts into space, mainly by making rockets that could be launched more than once. It first contracted with NASA in 2006.
Currently, most of SpaceX’s work continues to revolve around rockets and the operation of Starlink, a fleet of satellites offering internet connectivity across the globe. But Musk often discusses grander ambitions for the company, including putting data centers needed for AI in space and building a self-sufficient city on Mars, which many experts have said could be impossible to realise.
