SpaceX, the Texas-based rocket and satellite company founded by Elon Musk in 2002, has filed plans to raise approximately $75 billion through an initial public offering (IPO) that would shatter all previous records. In a filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission on Wednesday, the company said it will sell 555.6 million shares at $135 each, giving it a market valuation of $1.77 trillion. Shares are expected to begin trading on the Nasdaq stock exchange on 12 June. The offering would comfortably eclipse the previous record set by Saudi Aramco, the state-owned oil giant, which raised around $26 billion at a valuation of $1.7 trillion in 2019.

At that valuation, SpaceX would rank as the seventh-largest company in the world by market capitalisation, surpassing both Tesla and Meta and sitting just behind Taiwanese chipmaker TSMC. Musk, who holds roughly a 42 percent stake in the company, is widely expected to become the world's first trillionaire as a result. Despite the public listing, he will retain firm control of SpaceX through a dual-class share structure: his ownership of Class B shares, which carry 10 votes per share rather than one, will give him approximately 82 percent of the company's total voting power. One notable departure from standard IPO practice is SpaceX's decision to set a fixed share price before its investor roadshow, rather than announcing a preliminary range to be adjusted based on demand — a move analysts describe as reflecting Musk's confidence in the deal and his leverage over its terms.

SpaceX's prospectus is anything but conventional. Written in unusually vivid language for a regulatory document, it lays out ambitions to return humans to the Moon — as part of NASA's Artemis programme, now targeting a lunar landing in 2028 — and ultimately to establish a permanent colony of at least one million people on Mars, framing the mission as essential to the long-term survival of humanity. The company has also absorbed Musk's artificial intelligence firm xAI and operates Starlink, a satellite broadband service with 10.3 million subscribers across 164 markets, which has become a significant source of revenue for the capital-intensive business.

Yet the listing arrives with a significant caveat: SpaceX is not profitable. The company reported a net loss of $4.9 billion on revenues of $18.7 billion in 2025, followed by a further $4.3 billion loss in the first quarter of this year. Analysts note the contrast with Saudi Aramco, whose record IPO was underpinned by a long track record of enormous profits. SpaceX's valuation, by contrast, rests on future potential — and on investor faith that Musk will deliver on promises that critics have called science fiction. Market sentiment nevertheless appears strong, with buyers of investment products linked to the listing already pricing SpaceX's end-of-first-day valuation at around $2.2 trillion. The parallel most often drawn is with Tesla, which debuted as a loss-making company in 2010 but became one of the most valuable in the world once it turned profitable in 2013.

The SpaceX listing is the first of at least three landmark IPOs expected in 2026, with AI companies OpenAI and Anthropic also preparing to go public. Together, the debuts are expected to inject trillions of dollars in new value into US stock markets, which are already trading near record highs on the back of the global artificial intelligence boom. For investors, the central question is whether SpaceX's extraordinary ambitions — rockets, satellite internet, AI, and eventually Mars — justify a valuation built almost entirely on the promise of what is yet to come.