Elon Musk’s SpaceX filed its public registration statement with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Wednesday May 20, 2026, officially setting in motion what is widely expected to be the largest initial public offering in the history of financial markets, and revealing for the first time a detailed financial picture of one of the most consequential private companies ever built.
The rocket and satellite company will trade under the ticker symbol SPCX on the Nasdaq. It is targeting a listing date of June 12.
It is seeking a valuation of over $1.75 trillion. It is aiming to raise approximately $75 billion.
For context: Saudi Aramco’s 2019 IPO raised $29 billion and held the record as the largest in history.
SpaceX is targeting a raise of more than two and a half times that amount, at a valuation that would make it the most valuable company to ever debut on a public exchange.
“It will trade under the ticker symbol SPCX,” CNN reported Wednesday evening. The filing revealed “previously undisclosed details, including its board members, sales, profit, expenses and how it does business.”
One thing it did not disclose. The exact price per share or the precise valuation the company expects to receive. Those details come later, just before the listing.
What The Filing Revealed
SpaceX has been a private company since Elon Musk founded it in 2002.
It has been the most significant private company in the aerospace industry for more than a decade, disrupting launch costs, developing reusable rockets, building the world’s largest satellite constellation through Starlink and winning the contracts that have made it the dominant commercial and government launch provider on Earth.
All of that happened without the disclosure requirements that come with being a public company.
Wednesday’s filing changed that. For the first time, SpaceX disclosed financial data that the investment community has been estimating and speculating about for years.
The company generated approximately $18.67 billion in revenue in 2025. Profit is estimated at potentially as high as $8 billion.
The board of directors, previously a matter of rumor and partial disclosure, is now on the public record.
The filing does not include SpaceX’s forward guidance in the conventional sense.
The company has declined to disclose how much it expects to raise or what the final valuation will be until closer to the actual listing date, consistent with how large IPOs typically manage the final pricing process, where the exact share price and size are set through a bookbuilding process with institutional investors in the days before listing.
What is publicly estimated from reporting by Bloomberg, the Financial Times and CNN is a target raise of approximately $75 billion and a target valuation of over $1.75 trillion.
Those figures, if achieved, would rewrite the record books in a way that makes every prior IPO comparison feel inadequate.
The xAI Merger And What It Means For The Valuation
The SpaceX that filed Wednesday is not the SpaceX of 2025. In February 2026, SpaceX completed an all-stock merger with xAI, the artificial intelligence company Musk founded in 2023 to compete with OpenAI, Google and Anthropic in the large language model and AI infrastructure market.
The merger valued SpaceX at $1 trillion and xAI at $250 billion, creating a combined entity worth $1.25 trillion at the time of closing.
The jump from the $1.25 trillion post-merger valuation to the $1.75 trillion IPO target reflects several things simultaneously, the market’s expectation of continued Starlink revenue growth, the premium investors are willing to pay for AI exposure that the xAI component represents and the specific optimism around what SpaceX’s ability to deploy AI infrastructure in space might eventually produce.
The xAI component also introduces specific risk factors that the filing is required to disclose.
xAI was burning approximately $1 billion per month at the time of the merger. Multiple co-founders of xAI had departed before the companies combined.
The AI business is genuinely competitive, with OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind and Meta all pursuing overlapping capabilities.
The $250 billion valuation of xAI that was baked into the merger terms is the part of the combined company’s valuation that carries the most uncertainty.
What Is SpaceX?
SpaceX was founded in 2002 with a mission that most aerospace industry veterans considered delusional, reduce the cost of access to space by an order of magnitude and eventually colonize Mars.
The first three Falcon 1 launches failed. The fourth succeeded in September 2008, saving the company from insolvency.
The Falcon 9 followed, and with it the reusable rocket technology that has since reduced launch costs by orders of magnitude compared to the expendable rocket era that preceded SpaceX’s dominance.
The company today is simultaneously the world’s most capable commercial launch provider, the operator of the largest satellite internet constellation in history and the developer of the most powerful rocket ever built in Starship, the vehicle designed to carry humans and cargo to the Moon and eventually to Mars.
The Starlink constellation now serves millions of customers globally, providing satellite internet access in rural and remote areas where terrestrial connectivity does not reach.
Revenue from Starlink is the financial foundation that makes SpaceX’s Mars ambitions financially possible rather than purely aspirational.
The government contract dimension of the business is substantial and structural.
SpaceX holds contracts with NASA for crewed missions to the International Space Station through the Commercial Crew program, contracts for the Artemis lunar lander, DoD contracts for national security satellite launches and a range of military and intelligence community relationships that make it effectively embedded in the national security space architecture of the United States government.
That government revenue provides a floor beneath the more speculative components of the valuation.
The Musk Factor And What Analysts Are Saying
The most honest thing any analyst has said about the SpaceX valuation came from a researcher who told NPR:
“The valuation is completely dependent on the degree to which people believe in Elon Musk.”
That statement is not a criticism. It is a description of the specific investment thesis that SpaceX presents.
A $1.75 trillion valuation at 2025 revenue of $18.67 billion implies a revenue multiple of roughly ten times. Standard comparable companies in aerospace and satellite communications trade at far lower multiples.
The premium embedded in the SpaceX valuation reflects the market’s belief that SpaceX under Musk is not a standard aerospace and satellite company, it is a platform that could produce revenue streams far beyond what its current business implies, in space tourism, AI infrastructure, interplanetary logistics and categories that do not yet have names.
To justify the $1.75 trillion valuation on financial fundamentals rather than belief, the company would need to achieve revenues exceeding $150 billion by approximately 2030 at a 12-times multiple.
That would require flawless execution across Starlink’s global expansion, the AI integration through xAI, and the development of genuine Mars colonization infrastructure that generates commercial revenue rather than simply consuming capital.
It is an ambitious trajectory. It is also the trajectory that Musk has been describing, in various forms, since 2002.
If those milestones are reached, the specific valuation milestones written into Musk’s compensation arrangement and the Mars colony establishment that is referenced in his potential bonus structure, Musk would become the first individual in history with a net worth exceeding one trillion dollars.
When SpaceX lists, he will also become the first person to head two separate publicly traded companies each valued at over one trillion dollars. Tesla is the other.
The Road To June 12
The filing today begins the formal public registration process that precedes the listing. Institutional investors will now begin their due diligence on the disclosed financials.
The underwriting banks, which are not named in the initial CNN reporting but which Reuters reported earlier include four major Wall Street banks, will begin the bookbuilding process that determines what price institutional investors are willing to pay for shares.
The exact IPO price per share, the final amount raised and the specific valuation will be disclosed in an amended S-1 filing in the days before the June 12 target date.
The SEC review process and investor roadshow will occupy the next three weeks.
The company that Elon Musk founded in a converted warehouse in El Segundo, California in 2002 with the explicitly stated goal of making humanity a multi-planetary species is filing to go public.
The Mars ambition is in the regulatory filing, alongside the revenue numbers and the board members and the risk factors. Wall Street is about to decide what that ambition is worth.
