SpaceX’s planned $1.5 trillion IPO is on track to be gargantuan enough

Some Elon Musk fans have long envisioned “Musk Inc.” — a tech monolith that brings the companies controlled by the world’s richest man under one giant umbrella. That reality might be more than a fantasy, as SpaceX is reportedly targeting a mid-June IPO, with considerations of a potential merger with Tesla or xAI. 

Consistent with Musk’s history of making light of major business moves, the rocket company is planning to go public when Jupiter and Venus appear very close together, which would likely be around June 9, according to astronomer Dominic Ford.

Any tie-up between SpaceX and Musk’s other companies would make it easier to pursue some of his most ambitious visions, like putting data centers into space. It would also be unbelievably complicated, particularly for Tesla, which is already public. But, even if the rocket company ends up going public on its own, it will be a serious force of gravity in the public markets, as it aims to raise as much as $50 billion at a targeted valuation of around $1.5 trillion.

At that kind of price tag, SpaceX alone would likely be the second-most-valuable IPO in history, second only to Saudi Arabia’s state-sponsored company, Aramco, which went public at a $1.7 trillion market cap, but with just ~1.5% of the company available for sale to the general public. In terms of money raised, SpaceX’s target to close $50 billion in new investment would be the biggest ever. OpenAI, another cash-burning tech name looking to potentially debut this year, could be the only challenge to that title.

SpaceX is likely to be very different. Indeed, retail traders are already showing appetite: the Private Shares Fund run by Kevin Moss — which invests exclusively in private companies, including 14% of its holdings in SpaceX — has seen its inflows surging more than 200% since the rocket maker’s IPO news was first announced in early December. 

Whichever direction the company chooses to open its investor base, Elon Musk is likely to be a big winner, with his ~42% stake in the rocket company potentially worth more than $600 billion if the targeted valuation is hit. That would be way more than his Tesla nest egg, worth some $178 billion per Bloomberg’s Billionaires Index based on today’s market cap figures.