Trillion dollar rocket man: Why Elon Musk’s SpaceX could come crashing back down to earth after its record-setting IPO

Elon Musk has managed to outpace his main artificial intelligence rivals, Anthropic and OpenAI, by becoming the first to complete preparations for an initial public offering (IPO). In effect, Musk has seized from them the opportunity to attract large-scale and scarce investment capital.

The primary purpose of a traditional IPO is to raise public equity capital to scale production, modernize technology, or expand into new markets. Investors, in turn, gain the opportunity to acquire a stake in an operating business in anticipation of future returns, relying on established stock market regulations. However, the listing of Elon Musk’s aerospace corporation SpaceX on the Nasdaq does not conform to these fundamental principles.

SpaceX is the technological leader in its industry, having effectively monopolized the market for commercial orbital launches. Its subsidiary Starlink, which provides Ukraine with communications terminals during the war, has ensured critically important, reliable connectivity and the uninterrupted operation of the country’s government and civilian infrastructure. In 2025, Starlink generated about 60% of the parent company’s $18.7 billion in revenue. Nevertheless, the valuation at which the offering was conducted has raised concerns among independent financial analysts.

Rather than reflecting a reasonable valuation supported by current cash flows, the market is confronting what experts describe as long-term speculative valuation strategy. The SpaceX IPO risks becoming a large-scale mechanism for transferring risk, in which the ultimate buyers of overpriced shares will not be sophisticated venture investors but ordinary citizens, since the structure of the offering in many ways resembles crypto schemes built around AI hype.

The economics of “selling a dream”: a history of unfulfilled promises

According to the company’s own assessment, SpaceX is expected to achieve an astronomical market capitalization of between $1.75 trillion and $1.77 trillion. That would place it among the ten most valuable publicly traded corporations on the planet. To understand how far removed this figure is from economic reality, it is necessary to examine the company’s financial performance during the most recent reporting period.

In 2025, SpaceX generated total revenue of $18.7 billion. At the same time, the corporation recorded a net loss of $4.9 billion. By contrast, all of the world’s five most valuable companies were profitable in 2025. For example, Microsoft ended the year with $128 billion in profit, an increase of 17% compared with 2024. Other technology giants also posted strong results: NVIDIA reported enormous earnings, Apple revamped its strategy, while Alphabet (Google) and Amazon likewise demonstrated high profitability. As a result, a deeply loss-making business valued at nearly one hundred times its annual revenue is arriving on the Nasdaq stock exchange.