Elon Musk is officially taking SpaceX public, Bloomberg reported on Wednesday.
SpaceX filed confidentially for an IPO with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, according to the outlet, citing people familiar with the matter. A confidential filing helps the company seek regulatory approval first before presenting the information to public scrutiny. That means information is still unavailable on SpaceX’s financials and the price range it’s gunning for with the IPO until the SEC makes it public.
SpaceX could be seeking a valuation of more than $1.75 trillion, the sources told Bloomberg, which would make the public offering one of the largest IPOs in history.
The company is expecting to raise more than $75 billion in the offering, according to a recent The Information report. If all goes as expected, that would place it among a small group of IPOs worldwide to have raised more than $20 billion and shatter the previous record set by oil giant Saudi Aramco, which raised $29.4 billion in 2019.
The company, which as of February is the amalgamation of both SpaceX and xAI, is reportedly on track for a June listing on the stock market. A Reuters report from this week said that it was working with a whopping 21 different banks for the IPO.
Musk founded SpaceX in 2002. Roughly 20 years later, he founded xAI in 2023 with a group of 11 engineers, all of whom had left as of this past weekend, as Musk undertakes an organizational restructuring after merging the AI company with SpaceX.
Currently, SpaceX is the largest private space company in the U.S., but the IPO would have make-or-break implications for more than just the space industry. It is also deeply linked to AI hype, and not just through xAI’s Grok.
SpaceX is planning to use the IPO to fund its incredibly expensive plans to put data centers in space.
Musk announced the company’s first major steps towards achieving that goal earlier this month. In February, SpaceX filed an FCC application to launch an orbital data center constellation of up to 1 million Starlinks. Musk’s two companies, SpaceX and Tesla, are planning to build a giant chip factory in Austin, Texas, to make inference chips for Tesla’s cars and robots, and high-powered chips to be used in space.
The plan will put significant financial strain on the company that previously reported that it is shelling out more than $20 billion this year, without factoring in the giant chip factory it’s building in Texas or its solar factory projects.
SpaceX is also only the first of three major AI-related IPOs expected this year. Rival AI giants Anthropic and OpenAI are also both reportedly planning to go public later this year.
Investors are already visibly more wary of AI hype and the large financial commitments from tech giants, with even a once stock-driving event like Nvidia’s GTC causing only a small move in the company’s shares in March. How these three IPOs will actually be received by the market later this year will likely either save the AI trade or be the nail in its coffin.
