Goldman Sachs will take the lead position on SpaceX's initial public offering, which is expected to be the largest in history, according to people familiar with the matter who spoke to CNBC. The reusable rocket company, founded and run by Elon Musk, could release its prospectus to the public as soon as Wednesday.
Morgan Stanley will follow Goldman in the underwriting lineup, with Bank of America, Citigroup, and JPMorgan Chase rounding out the major banks on the filing. The arrangement mirrors the 2010 Tesla IPO, the last time Musk took a company public, when Goldman also led the offering, followed by Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan, and Deutsche Bank.
SpaceX was most recently valued at $1.25 trillion by Musk after he merged the company with xAI, his artificial intelligence startup, in February. That valuation would make the offering far larger than any tech IPO in U.S. history. For comparison, only two tech companies, Facebook and Alibaba, have been valued at even $100 billion after their first day of trading on U.S. exchanges.
The scale of the offering is coming into focus at a moment when the broader IPO market is showing new signs of life. AI chipmaker Cerebras debuted on the Nasdaq last week and closed with a market cap of about $95 billion, setting the stage for what could be a year of large IPOs tied to artificial intelligence. SpaceX appears to be moving deliberately to get to market ahead of OpenAI and Anthropic, two AI model companies each valued at close to $1 trillion by private investors, both of which are eyeing public listings as soon as this year.
The prospectus is set to arrive just days after Musk suffered a legal defeat in federal court. An advisory jury in Oakland, California, ruled Monday that Musk waited too long to sue OpenAI and CEO Sam Altman over claims that Altman broke a promise to keep OpenAI, which Musk helped start nine years earlier, a nonprofit. The verdict was immediately adopted by District Court Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers. Musk called the decision a "calendar technicality," and vowed to appeal.
SpaceX did not immediately respond to a request for comment from CNBC.
The company filed confidentially with the Securities and Exchange Commission last month. A public prospectus filing would begin the formal process leading toward a listing date, though no timeline for trading has been announced. The size of the final offering and the exchange on which SpaceX would list have not been disclosed in the source reporting.
