It’s official: SpaceX is on track to be the largest IPO in history, seeking to raise $75 billion once it goes public later this month.
The company will sell 555.6 million Class A shares at a fixed price of $135 each, according to an amended statement filed with the SEC on Wednesday. Combined with the company’s total shares outstanding, that prices SpaceX at roughly $1.77 trillion; enough to make it, on arrival, the seventh-largest company in the U.S. per the Fortune 500 list, walloping current no. 7 spot Berkshire Hathaway, and even CEO Elon Musk’s other darling, Tesla, which trades at a market cap of about $1.6 trillion.
The company going public is not just a rocket maker, anymore. February’s all-stock absorption of xAI turned SpaceX into a money-losing satellite-internet and AI conglomerate, with proceeds earmarked partly for expanding AI compute alongside the Starlink network. Musk makes the goal in the prospectus very clear: get a colony of a million people on Mars. The rockets are to transport there, and the AI is to organize the colony and also figure out how to get a million people on Mars.
How much of the $80 billion actually reaches that buildout is another question: as Fortune has reported, more than three-quarters of the proceeds are already spoken for, pledged to repay debt held by Valor Equity Partners, X Corp, and xAI investors, and to pay EchoStar for a spectrum acquisition, leaving less than $18 billion for the AI express.
What is clear is that Musk has full control of the company. The amendment shows the founder, CEO, CTO, and chairman holding roughly 82.4% of voting power after the offering, enough to elect or eject a majority of the board outright and to make SpaceX a “controlled company” exempt from certain Nasdaq governance rules. Public shareholders are just along for the ride to space.
The filing starts the timer on a hot IPO summer, with the other rumored trillion-dollar listings—Anthropic and OpenAI—set to follow. Anthropic confidentially filed its prospectus on Monday.
The question on Wall Street’s mind is whether there’s enough money in the public markets to absorb them all. Nasdaq controversially rewrote its rules last month in anticipation of the megacap arrivals, allowing the largest IPOs to enter its prestigious Nasdaq 100 index after just 15 trading days, rather than waiting months for the index’s regular reconstitution; and scrapping its 10% minimum float requirement in the process.
SpaceX is expected to float barely 4% of the company, and Nasdaq index funds will be forced to absorb SpaceX shares mechanically, at whatever price prevails. That hands early SpaceX investors a ready exit in what would be the biggest payday in startup history.
SpaceX’s lockup period, like everything else about the company, is unorthodox: instead of a standard 180-day cliff, insiders can sell up to 20% of their locked shares once the company reports its first quarterly earnings, with an additional 10% if the stock is trading at least 30% above the IPO price.The shares unlock in staggered tranches starting after the company’s second earnings report; expected to be around late July or early August. Musk himself can’t sell for 366 days. The structure is designed to gradually increase the float—and accelerate SpaceX’s inclusion in the Nasdaq 100.
-1024x683.jpg "Florida Roads Become a Battleground for Illegal Immigration")
