SpaceX filed paperwork Wednesday for a public stock offering that could value the company at up to $1.75 trillion and push founder Elon Musk's net worth past $1 trillion, making him the first trillionaire in history.
The listing is expected as early as June 11, according to Al Jazeera, with shares trading under the ticker symbol SPCX. Because Musk holds a majority stake in the company, his share alone could be worth more than $600 billion. Last year, Musk became the first person to reach a net worth of $500 billion. A successful IPO would more than double that figure.
The filing, reported by BBC News, gave the public its first detailed look at SpaceX's finances. The company, officially known as Space Exploration Technologies, brought in $18.6 billion in revenue last year but posted a net loss of $4.9 billion. In the first quarter of this year, it recorded $4.7 billion in sales and a net loss of $4.3 billion. Its balance sheet shows $102 billion in assets and $60.5 billion in debt.
Most of SpaceX's revenue comes from its Starlink satellite internet network, which now includes roughly 10,000 satellites and serves consumers, governments, and enterprise customers worldwide. The company's pioneering use of reusable rockets has reshaped the economics of the space industry, forcing competitors including Jeff Bezos's Blue Origin to accelerate their own programs. SpaceX was founded in 2002 and has grown into the world's largest space business.
The IPO filing also revealed the financial terms of a deal SpaceX recently struck with AI company Anthropic, the developer of the Claude chatbot. Anthropic will pay $15 billion a year to access data centers in the American South for Musk's xAI unit, which SpaceX recently acquired. Musk has said he intends to dissolve xAI and pursue his AI ambitions under the SpaceX umbrella. The xAI unit still loses money, according to the filing.
The filing also flagged more than half a billion dollars in expected legal costs from a range of ongoing lawsuits. Among them are multiple cases alleging that Grok, the chatbot made by xAI, is being used to create sexualized deepfakes of real women and girls. Other listed cases involve patent infringement claims, music copyright infringement claims, data breach claims, and claims of noncompliance with EU content moderation rules. SpaceX also owns X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, which Musk purchased in 2022.
The filing arrived days after Musk lost a high-profile legal battle against rival AI company OpenAI and its chief executive, Sam Altman. Musk had accused Altman of breaching a non-profit contract by shifting the ChatGPT-maker to a for-profit structure after Musk had donated millions of dollars to the organization. A jury voted unanimously to throw out the case, finding that the timeframe to bring Musk's claims had expired.
The IPO also comes as SpaceX prepares to test its next-generation Starship rocket, which is central to Musk's plans for lunar and Mars missions and the expansion of Starlink. That test launch, originally scheduled for Tuesday, was expected later this week at the time of filing. The SpaceX board has tied much of Musk's compensation to targets that include establishing a permanent human colony on Mars and building space data centers powered by the equivalent of 100 terawatts of compute capacity. If the offering proceeds on schedule, shares could begin trading on June 12.
