SpaceX has never done things by halves, and its entrance onto the public markets is no exception. The rocket maker is attempting to raise a staggering $75 billion through an IPO that shatters pretty much every convention Wall Street has spent decades perfecting.
Here’s the most striking part: SpaceX isn’t playing the typical IPO game. Instead of offering a price range and then pricing the deal based on investor demand, as just about every other company does, SpaceX has simply told the market the price. Take it or leave it. $135 per share. That’s it.
Elon Musk, who will retain control of the company even after it goes public, has essentially handed Wall Street a finished deal and said figure it out. It’s bold, it’s unusual, and it’s very much in line with how Musk has operated SpaceX from day one.
The company is valued at a mind-boggling $1.77 trillion, making it one of the most valuable companies in the world before it even trades a single share on the open market. To put that in perspective, among the nine public trillion-dollar companies currently floating around, the smallest by revenue is Micron with $58 billion over the past year. SpaceX generated $18.7 billion in revenue last year but posted an operating loss of $4.2 billion. So yeah, they’re not exactly earning their valuation on profits right now.
“There’s zero math that makes any sense whatsoever,” said Lise Buyer, founder of IPO consultancy Class V Group. That quote kind of says it all.
The interesting wrinkle here is that because SpaceX has already fixed its price, the company can start allocating shares way earlier than normal. Normally, underwriters spend weeks building a book, floating a price range, adjusting based on interest, and then pricing the night before trading begins. SpaceX is skipping most of that dance. The company told investors it would stop taking orders on Wednesday, a full day early, which gives Thursday to sort out where all those shares are actually going.
That’s critical because SpaceX wants retail investors to get roughly 30% of the shares being sold. Thirty percent. In a typical IPO, retail gets maybe 5% to 10%. Fidelity, Robinhood, Charles Schwab, SoFi, and E-Trade are all listed as platforms that will make shares available. That’s a huge chunk of the offering going directly to everyday people instead of the usual institutional players, and it adds another layer of complexity to an already unusual process.
Of course, retail enthusiasm doesn’t always translate to success. Robinhood’s own IPO in 2021 wanted to sell between 20% and 35% of shares to retail investors but ended up at the lower end of that range. The stock fell 8% on debut. It’s a reminder that just because the intention is there doesn’t mean the outcome follows.
Let’s be honest: SpaceX has built something remarkable. They dominate the commercial launch market, they have NASA’s trust, and they’re literally the only game in town for certain kinds of missions. But $1.77 trillion for a company losing $4.2 billion annually? That’s betting on the future so aggressively that you’re essentially asking the market to trust a vision rather than a balance sheet.
Whether that bet pays off will become clear starting Friday when trading begins. But one thing is already certain: this IPO won’t be ordinary.
