The reusable-rocket giant is bypassing traditional listing rules with a historic debut.
SpaceX is poised to be the king of mega-IPOs, leading an upcoming wave of listings fueled by the boom in AI and technological innovation.
Nothing about Friday’s scheduled listing of Elon Musk’s reusable-rocket company on Nasdaq resembles anything we have seen so far in U.S. capital markets. The sheer scale of the offering—a $74 billion-to-$75 billion capital raise for a mere 5% stake—nearly doubles the previous record set by Saudi Aramco in 2019. Furthermore, its fixed pricing at $135 a share and the decision to allocate a massive 30% to retail investors are highly unconventional moves. Equally striking are the offering’s valuation metrics, which price the loss-making company at $1.75 trillion, or roughly 92 times its sales.
While there are already rumblings about SpaceX’s excessive valuation, investors are eager for exposure to a new and hard-to-quantify field: the space economy. They gain a piece of Musk’s Starlink for commercial internet in space, his xAI for AI, and his social media with X: all within a multi-business conglomerate. For this, they will pay what has been described as the “Elon Premium.”
Why SpaceX Chose This Moment
The massive shift toward tech investment embodied by the SpaceX IPO raises more questions than answers: Why now? Does it signal confidence in the current market, or does it coincide with a top? And why list only in the U.S., bypassing other global exchanges?
The answer is simple: U.S. equities are at record highs, with tech stocks leading the surge.
Add to that, Musk convinced the managers of the Nasdaq-100, Russell, and FTSE equity indexes to change their rules to include SpaceX faster than ever before for an IPO, and there’s another incentive to debut now.
I find it interesting, however, that S&P Dow Jones Indices announced last week that no new stock will be included in the S&P 500 for at least 12 months after its listing, even after four consecutive quarters of positive GAAP profitability. Musk knows that inclusion in major indexes increases demand for any given stock and forces institutional investors and ETFs to automatically buy billions of dollars of that stock. But S&P turned him down.
The IPO Pipeline Builds
Is SpaceX indicative of an appetite for other upcoming mega-IPOs?
Goldman Sachs predicts $225 billion in U.S. IPOs in 2026: an astonishing leap from last year’s $38 billion. These mega listings could very well dampen interest in other stocks and smaller IPOs. After all, over the past 30 years, the number of listed companies on U.S. exchanges fell to nearly 4,000 from 8,000.
Beyond Friday’s historic offering, several more mega-IPOs are on the horizon. Claude’s parent, Anthropic, is estimated to be valued at up to $965 billion while competitor ChatGPT’s OpenAI is valued as high as $1 trillion. Outside the U.S., fast-fashion maker Shein will list in Hong Kong with a valuation close to $66 billion. Australian online graphics company Canva is expected to list on Nasdaq at more than $44 billion. Next year, European business software maker Visma plans to list in Norway for $22 billion while UK financial technology banking platform Revolut might list in the U.S. in 2028.
Getting back to “why now,” raising billions of dollars at a valuation considered very high—SpaceX is still in the red, with $4.9 billion in losses on $18.7 billion in revenue last year—is probably not the main reason for going public. What companies like Musk’s are seeking is greater exposure to retail and institutional investors in the world’s most liquid equity market, before that window closes.
How these mega-cap IPOs are received remains to be seen, and many questions may finally get answers in the coming months. But until then, SpaceX’s stock price in the coming weeks will be the market’s first test flight for mega-cap IPOs.
Let the countdown begin.
Andrea Fiano is Global Finance’s editor-at-large. Contact him at afiano@gfmag.com.
