Moonshots and
Musk's Billions
SpaceX's
record-breaking debut on the Nasdaq is a triumph of spectacle over substance.
Its financials deserve far more scrutiny than the fanfare they are receiving.
HYDERABAD, June 12th 2026
When Elon Musk's SpaceX began trading on the Nasdaq on
Friday, pricing 555m shares at $135 apiece and raising over $75bn, Wall Street
responded with the breathless enthusiasm it reserves for spectacles of this
magnitude. The offering dwarfs Saudi Aramco's $29.4bn debut in 2019 — itself a
record that stood for seven years — and values SpaceX at just under $1.8trn,
placing it in the rarefied company of America's ten largest listed firms. A
trillionaire, if share prices hold, could soon exist. Whether the underlying
business deserves such a valuation is a rather more interesting question.
The answer, on sober inspection, is: not yet, and perhaps
not ever without extraordinary luck. SpaceX generated $18.7bn in revenue in
2025 — impressive, certainly — but it also produced a net loss of $4.9bn,
almost entirely attributable to voracious spending on artificial-intelligence
infrastructure. The company's filing asks investors to believe in a future
revenue figure of over $28.5trn. That figure is not a forecast so much as a
science-fiction plot summary, requiring the successful colonisation of Mars,
the proliferation of data centres in orbit and the global dominance of
Starlink, all materialising on schedule.
"A trillion dollars in the hands of one man is
incompatible not only with an affordable economy, but also with a healthy
democracy." — Nabil Ahmed, Oxfam America
The Structure of Ambition
What is being listed is not simply a rocket company. In
the years since Musk co-founded SpaceX in 2002, it has become a conglomerate of
Muskovian proportions. The entity now trading under the ticker SPCX encompasses
the Starlink satellite internet network, xAI — Musk's artificial intelligence
venture, home of the Grok chatbot — and, folded in for good measure, the social
media platform X, formerly Twitter. Investors buying shares in SPCX are thus
purchasing exposure to a bewildering array of businesses at different stages of
viability, unified chiefly by the personality and judgment of one man.
This concentration of power is not a bug, in the eyes of
SpaceX's fans; it is the feature. Mr Musk has, after all, delivered. SpaceX now
dominates commercial launch, operates the world's largest satellite
constellation and has fundamentally altered the economics of access to orbit.
These are genuine achievements, and they justify a premium valuation by any
rational measure. The question is what multiple of reality, rather than
promise, the market is pricing.
A Bull Market in Belief
Bloomberg reported that the offering was more than four
times oversubscribed, with demand among retail investors — who were allocated
20% of shares — described as high. That appetite is not irrational in
isolation. SpaceX's trajectory has repeatedly confounded sceptics. What is
striking, however, is how thoroughly the financial case for the IPO rests not
on present earnings but on the successful delivery of technologies that do not
yet exist at commercial scale.
The Starlink case is the most plausible component of the
bull thesis. Satellite broadband is a real and growing market, and Starlink has
established genuine first-mover advantages in low-Earth orbit. It is generating
meaningful revenue. Yet the network's expansion requires perpetual capital, and
competition — from Amazon's Project Kuiper among others — is intensifying.
Counting on Starlink alone to justify even a fraction of the $1.8trn valuation
would require ambitious market-share assumptions.
The xAI component is more speculative still. Grok, the
chatbot at the centre of Mr Musk's AI ambitions, has not gained the traction of
OpenAI's ChatGPT or Anthropic's Claude. The AI market is crowded, fast-moving
and brutally unforgiving to second-movers without structural advantages. That
SpaceX's losses are driven substantially by AI spending — a field in which the
company is not, by most measures, a leader — should give investors pause.
The Musk Discount — and
Premium
One of the stranger features of the SpaceX IPO is the
degree to which its valuation is simultaneously boosted and threatened by its
founder. Mr Musk's association with the offering was more than four-times
oversubscribed, and a significant portion of that demand is attributable to his
celebrity among a particular class of retail investor, shaped by his years as
an internet folk hero and amplified by his enormous platform on X.
Yet Mr Musk is also, by any objective measure, a more
polarising figure than he was when SpaceX last raised private capital. His
tenure leading the Department of Government Efficiency under President Trump —
a months-long exercise in headline-generating budget theatrics — ended in
departure and left a complicated legacy. His enthusiastic promotion of
right-wing populists in the United States and Europe has alienated a
significant portion of the consumer and investor base that once admired him
uncritically. Tesla's share price has reflected this dynamic; SpaceX, as a
private company until now, has been insulated from it.
Listing changes that calculus. SPCX will be subject to
the quarterly scrutiny of public markets and the whims of an electorate of
shareholders who include, in significant numbers, people with views about Mr
Musk's public conduct. The offering's four-times oversubscription suggests the
Musk premium remains intact for now. Whether it endures through a first
difficult earnings call, or a fresh controversy on X, is another matter.
Wealth, Power and
Democratic Accountability
The prospect of a trillionaire is not merely a financial
curiosity. Going into the listing, Mr Musk's fortune was estimated at $782bn —
nearly three times that of the next wealthiest individual, Google co-founder
Larry Page. A successful debut at the IPO price would push that figure beyond
$1trn. This has prompted predictable commentary from critics on the left, but
the concern is not merely ideological.
Nabil Ahmed of Oxfam America articulated the worry
plainly: "A trillion dollars in the hands of one man is incompatible not
only with an affordable economy, but also with a healthy democracy." That
view, whatever its political colouring, raises a legitimate empirical question:
what happens to competitive markets, regulatory institutions and democratic
accountability when a single individual commands wealth exceeding the GDP of
most countries? The United States has no settled answer to this question, and
SpaceX's IPO brings it rather urgently to the surface.
On the eve of the listing, activists displayed an
inflatable effigy of Mr Musk outside Nasdaq's Times Square offices to protest
the use of Grok to generate fake sexualized images — a reminder that SpaceX's
conglomerate structure means that reputational risks in one corner of the
empire can migrate rapidly to the others. Wall Street may choose to price these
risks as negligible. History suggests that judgment is sometimes wrong.
The Verdict
SpaceX's IPO is a remarkable achievement, and the
company's underlying rocketry business is genuinely world-class. The Starlink
network is a credible business with real competitive advantages. On those
merits alone, SpaceX deserves a substantial valuation.
But the $1.8trn figure prices in outcomes that are, at
best, speculative: a profitable xAI rival to OpenAI; data centres in
geostationary orbit; Martian colonisation. The $4.9bn net loss in 2025 is not
an anomaly to be forgiven as infrastructure investment; it is the present
financial reality of a company spending aggressively on capabilities it has yet
to prove commercially. Retail investors, lured by the Musk premium and the
narrative of infinite possibility, should understand what they are buying: not
a business so much as a bet — on technologies, timelines, and one man's ability
to deliver on promises that make even generous optimists squint.
That bet may pay off. Many people said the same of a
rather smaller offering in a not dissimilar spirit twenty-odd years ago. But
investors who price hope without scrutinising the numbers have a habit, in the
long run, of providing rather expensive lessons for themselves and rather
agreeable ones for those who did their homework.
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