SpaceX is preparing for what promises to be the largest IPO in history, targeting a valuation of $1.75 trillion. To put that figure in perspective: it would exceed Meta and Tesla combined, and comfortably unseat Saudi Aramco as the biggest stock market debut ever. The offering is expected to draw massive demand from retail investors who have previously been locked out because SpaceX remained private.
The timing of this IPO reveals something curious. In aerospace, there's an important distinction between astronomy and astrology. Astronomy uses mathematics to calculate orbital mechanics so that multi-billion-dollar rockets don't become very expensive fireworks. Astrology is the belief that you should stay home from work next week because Jupiter is feeling a bit spicy. Usually the people building rockets and the people casting horoscopes don't have much in common.
Elon Musk cares about astronomy and science. He has spent decades talking about the importance of going to Mars and building rockets. But he also loves numerology. No one finds the numbers 420 and 69 funnier than Elon Musk does.
With the IPO announcement, we've learned that he loves astrology too. SpaceX has reportedly set its sights on IPOing in June because Jupiter, Venus, and Mercury will be forming a rare conjunction in the sky. June also happens to be the month of Musk's 55th birthday. And there are rumors the targeted date is June the 9th — or 69.
The Race for Capital
While the planetary alignment makes for a great headline, the timing might be driven by a more terrestrial concern: the race for limited capital.
As of early 2026, venture capital funds that have spent the last few years aggressively funding the AI boom are facing a liquidity plateau and are under pressure to finally return some cash to their own investors. At the same time, Musk is in a high-stakes race to reach the public markets before his rivals — OpenAI and Anthropic — soak up all the available demand.
Bankers are quietly warning that there might not be enough spare cash in the public markets to support three massive capital-intensive AI listings at the same time. The first mover might get the biggest slice of the pie.
With XAI burning through a billion dollars a month and massive data center projects requiring billions more in infrastructure, Musk may not just be watching the stars. He might be watching the exits too.
This rush to the public markets represents a significant shift for Musk. For over a decade, he insisted that SpaceX would not go public until his Mars transport system was fully in place. He argued that the short-term pressures of being a public company — where investors obsess over quarterly performance and short sellers hit you with large sticks — would be a distraction from the long-term goal of making life multiplanetary.
But as the June 2026 listing approaches, the Mars transport system is still very much a work in progress. Musk has recently started sweeping those red planet ambitions under the rug like an embarrassing teenage phase.
The new mission and core IPO pitch is focused on the moon — a destination that Musk once dismissed as a waste of time. He now describes the Moon as a stepping stone and the overriding priority for securing the future of civilization.
This shift is easier when you've been foreshadowing it for years, even if accidentally. Elon Musk has been wearing his famous "Occupy Mars" t-shirts since 2019, which actually feature a red-tinted picture of the Moon during a lunar eclipse. It's possible he hasn't abandoned his Mars mission. He just realized he's been accidentally advertising for the Moon all along.
The XX Conglomerate
The transition from a high-flying rocketry and satellite firm into what we might now call the XX conglomerate — SpaceX, XAI, and X — has been described by supporters as an act of genius and by critics as a massive bailout.
Just as the SpaceX IPO was being finalized, Musk decided to fold XAI into SpaceX at a $250 billion price tag. Merging a rocket company with an AI startup is strange enough, but XAI comes with some particularly heavy social media baggage.
Last year, XAI used its shares to buy Elon Musk's Everything app X — the platform formerly and still known as Twitter. This means SpaceX investors are now, by extension, the proud owners of the number 17 ranked social media website, a business that has been struggling with a persistent exodus of both users and advertisers since Musk bought it for $44 billion in 2022.
To justify the $250 billion price tag, you have to believe that XAI is a top-tier player in AI. Currently, ChatGPT and Google's Gemini dominate the field, holding over 85% of the market between them. Grok, by comparison, sits at a distant 3.4% market share.
One problem is that Grok is effectively an island. While XAI recently launched a standalone Grok app, the vast majority of its usage remains trapped inside Twitter. Most of Grok's use is just fact-checking tweets or generating the kind of unfiltered memes that have landed the company in regulatory hot water in Spain, France, and the UK.
While SpaceX is said to be profitable, generating about $8 billion in revenue last year, XAI is a money furnace, burning through a billion dollars in cash every single month. In a world where AI could be a winner-take-all market much like internet search was, being a lower-ranked player is possibly a dangerous place to be.
That danger is exacerbated by a growing talent drain. Since the start of the year, a significant number of key staff have left XAI, including six of the original founders who were poached from Google and DeepMind. It's hard to justify a frontier AI premium when the very people who built the model have left the building.
Musk's explanation for the merger — delivered in a press release that reads like the script of a low-budget sci-fi epic — is that we need to build orbital data centers to extend the light of consciousness to the stars. He argues that space-based AI is the only way to scale because space is called space for a reason.
It's a move that mirrors the Solar City merger from 2016, where Musk used Tesla's balance sheet to bail out a struggling solar company he also happened to own.
As Bloomberg's Matt Levine pointed out, the innovation engine here isn't just about rockets. It's about a fundraising ability that allows Musk to negotiate with himself and set his own valuations without the nuisance of independent board oversight.
Amusingly, right before this article was filmed, Elon Musk tweeted that XAI was not built right the first time around, so it's being rebuilt from the foundations up. Which might lead SpaceX investors to ask: if this was the case, why did they just pay $250 billion for it?
For the banks and venture capital firms who were stuck in the underwater Twitter deal, the merger is fantastic news. It effectively swaps their struggling social media equity for shiny new SpaceX stock right before a massive IPO.
In the world of investing alongside Elon Musk, loyalty is the primary currency. If you complain too loudly about corporate governance, you risk being cut out of the next auspicious planetary alignment.
The Orbital Data Centers
To justify merging a rocket company with a money furnace chatbot, the IPO narrative relies on a very specific vision of the future based around the importance of moving the world's AI computing power off planet.
Musk's argument is that terrestrial data centers are hitting a wall because of land, power, and cooling constraints. His solution is to launch a constellation of a million satellites to act as orbital data centers directly harnessing near-constant solar power in the vacuum of space.
At first glance, the pitch might seem to have a certain logic. It's always sunny in space and there are no neighbors to complain about the noise. But in practice, the engineering hurdles are huge.
Take cooling, for example. On Earth, we keep servers from overheating by blowing cold air or water over them — a process called convection. In the vacuum of space, there's no air to move heat away. The only option is to use massive radiators that eject heat as infrared radiation.
We've already seen a test of this concept. A startup launched an AI satellite a few months ago that was about the size of a small refrigerator carrying an NVIDIA H100 chip. While the chip was able to successfully train a tiny AI model on the works of Shakespeare, it couldn't run around the clock because it had to shut down frequently when it got too hot to function.
The company's next version is scheduled to launch later this year, and they say it will carry the second largest cooling radiator array in space. The only larger one being the cooling array on the International Space Station.
So to run just a handful of AI chips in orbit, you need hardware that rivals the most expensive structure ever built by humanity — the International Space Station. And then you have to scale that up to the 1 million satellites mentioned in the SpaceX press release.
To reach the gigawatt-scale capacity Musk is talking about, you would need solar arrays and radiators measuring roughly four kilometers in length. Getting something that size — roughly the size of 40 football fields — into orbit and maintaining it would be a logistical nightmare. It would be a giant fragile sail vulnerable to every piece of space debris in low Earth orbit.
Then there's the issue of Starship. The entire sentient sun business model relies on SpaceX reaching an insane flight rate. We're talking about launches every hour carrying 200 tons per flight.
According to SpaceX's own press release, currently Starship is still in the frequent explosion phase of development. While the engineering team has achieved the incredible feat of catching a 70-meter booster with giant robot arms, the rocket is yet to perform a full orbital mission or prove that it can reliably deploy payloads without what SpaceX calls a rapid unscheduled disassembly.
To round out the sci-fi sales pitch, Musk has even proposed building factories on the Moon. According to the press release, the plan is to manufacture satellites taking advantage of lunar resources and then fire them into deep space using an electromagnetic mass driver — basically a giant space rail gun, a technology that the US Navy spent over $500 million on over a 16-year period with no success. Apparently, the rail gun prototypes suffered from extreme heat and physical stresses, the types of problems which would be only more of an issue in space.
It's not clear why a factory on the Moon would be more efficient than a factory in even the most remote places on Earth or what lunar resources Musk is planning on taking advantage of. A supply chain would still need to be developed there.
It is a bold vision and it represents a massive U-turn for a man who spent decades calling lunar missions a distraction from going to Mars. In 2017, he claimed that he would be sending at least two cargo missions to Mars in 2022 to find water sources and establish power, mining, and life support infrastructure so that the first crude missions could follow in 2024. He later reaffirmed this target in 2018 and again in 2020 before the timeline was delayed.
Ultimately, building a data center in a desert or a specialized warehouse on Earth will always be cheaper and easier than trying to build them in space or manufacture and launch them from the Moon.
Andrew Macallup, an engineer who works for a Space startup, built a web-based calculator that allows the cost of an orbital data center to be compared with the cost of an equivalent terrestrial one. It estimates that building a one-gigawatt data center and running it for five years on Earth costs around $16 billion excluding chips, and an orbital equivalent would cost over $50 billion. So more than three times as much.
The thing is that building a few data centers in Texas won't justify a $1.75 trillion valuation. For that, you need a sentient sun and a moon catapult.
Now this is possibly a recurring theme for Elon Musk: the idea that the hardest way of doing something is actually the most efficient. This is after all the same man who once claimed that digging miles of tunnels underground would somehow be orders of magnitude cheaper and faster than just building a road on the surface. Apparently, if you can convince investors that the laws of physics and basic accounting are just optional suggestions, you can put almost any price tag on the results.
If you can ignore the sentient suns and the lunar catapults for a moment, you're still left with the daunting task of justifying a $1.75 trillion sticker price for SpaceX. To be clear, that doesn't mean Elon Musk won't get that price. It just means it would be extremely difficult to explain based on what's being reported.
This isn't just a regular IPO. It's a carefully managed liquidity event for a company that has simply outgrown its capacity to source new capital.
Critics might note that the shift from Mars to Moon focus represents a dramatic pivot in narrative, and one could argue that the orbital data center vision is essentially science fiction dressed up as financial projection. The engineering challenges described here are formidable — perhaps insurmountable with current technology — which raises questions about whether this IPO valuation rests on foundations of sand rather than rock.
"If you can convince investors that the laws of physics and basic accounting are just optional suggestions, you can put almost any price tag on the results."
Bottom Line
The strongest part of this argument is the detailed deconstruction of SpaceX's orbital data center vision — the engineering challenges are real and well-documented. The biggest vulnerability is that none of this infrastructure actually exists yet; the valuation rests entirely on a science-fiction pitch for satellites that haven't been built, factories on the Moon that don't exist, and Starship rockets that still fail regularly. Watch for whether regulators push back on merging three distinct businesses — a rocket company, an AI startup, and a struggling social media platform — into one $1.75 trillion entity. The IPO may be less about SpaceX's actual financials and more about Musk's ability to sell a vision that defies physics while investors look the other way.