• NATURAL 20
  • Posts
  • SpaceX Is About To Break Wall Street

SpaceX Is About To Break Wall Street

How SpaceX’s trillion-dollar IPO could turn rockets, Starlink, defense, and AI infrastructure into one giant Wall Street story.

Author

Wes Roth
May 18, 2026

SpaceX is no longer just a rocket company.

It is becoming the center of a much bigger story: rockets, satellite internet, military communications, global broadband, AI compute, xAI, and maybe even orbital data centers. Now, according to Reuters and CNBC, Elon Musk's SpaceX has confidentially filed for a U.S. initial public offering, setting up what could become the largest IPO in history.

The reported target valuation is staggering: around $1.75 trillion.

If that number holds, SpaceX would instantly become one of the most valuable public companies in America. It would be worth more than Meta and Berkshire Hathaway at the time of listing, and the offering could raise $50 billion to $75 billion. That would dwarf Saudi Aramco's record-setting IPO and make SpaceX the kind of public market event that resets how investors think about the entire space economy.

But the most important part of this story is not the IPO itself.

It is why Wall Street is even willing to entertain a valuation this large.

The answer is Starlink.

SpaceX has the most dominant private launch business on Earth. It launches faster than any company or government space program in history. Reuters reported that SpaceX completed 165 launches in 2025, a new annual record. That is roughly one rocket launch every two days. This is not a speculative startup trying to prove demand. SpaceX has already transformed access to orbit.

But Starlink is what changes the valuation story.

Starlink is SpaceX's satellite internet business. It now reportedly has more than 10 million subscribers, is profitable, and accounts for a huge share of SpaceX's revenue. In simple terms, rockets get the attention, but Starlink gives investors the recurring revenue story they understand. It turns SpaceX from a launch company into a global communications infrastructure company.

That matters because Starlink is not just consumer internet.

It is rural broadband. It is maritime connectivity. It is aviation connectivity. It is emergency infrastructure. It is defense infrastructure. It is battlefield communications. It is direct-to-cell ambition. And eventually, it could become a core layer of the AI infrastructure stack if connectivity, satellites, and compute keep converging.

That is the bigger shift.

SpaceX is being valued not just as a company that sends rockets into space, but as a company that owns scarce physical infrastructure in a world where infrastructure is becoming the bottleneck. Launch capacity is scarce. Satellite networks are scarce. Spectrum is scarce. Power is scarce. GPU clusters are scarce. Data center capacity is scarce. And SpaceX is increasingly sitting at the intersection of all of it.

Reuters reported that SpaceX generated roughly $15 billion to $16 billion in revenue in 2025, with about $8 billion in EBITDA. Those are huge numbers for a private company. But they still make the $1.75 trillion valuation look extremely aggressive by normal Wall Street math.

That is the tension in the story.

On traditional multiples, SpaceX looks expensive. Very expensive. Reuters calculated that even if revenue and cash flow doubled from reported 2025 levels, SpaceX would still trade at eye-popping multiples at a $1.75 trillion market cap. A normal company would have a hard time defending that.

But SpaceX is not being priced like a normal company.

It is being priced like an Elon Musk company.

That means investors are not just buying present-day earnings. They are buying market dominance, founder premium, infrastructure scarcity, and future optionality. They are buying the idea that SpaceX is not simply participating in the space economy, but defining it.

Tesla is the obvious comparison.

Tesla never traded purely on normal auto-company valuation math. It traded on belief, disruption, execution speed, category dominance, and the idea that the company was not just selling cars, but reshaping transportation, energy, autonomy, and robotics. SpaceX now has a similar setup, except the core business is arguably even harder to replicate.

You cannot just copy SpaceX.

A competitor cannot wake up tomorrow and build reusable rockets, a global satellite internet network, NASA trust, defense contracts, launch cadence, Starbase, Starship, Starlink, and xAI-adjacent compute infrastructure. The barriers are physical, regulatory, technical, financial, and operational. That is why this IPO is so important.

SpaceX is one of the few companies in the world where the moat is not just software. It is steel, engines, satellites, spectrum, launch pads, manufacturing, power, political access, government relationships, and a two-decade head start.

That is also why the xAI connection matters.

SpaceX recently became even harder to categorize because Musk's AI ambitions are now increasingly tangled with the company. Reuters reported that SpaceX merged with xAI in a deal valuing the rocket company at $1 trillion and xAI at $250 billion. SpaceX has also been linked to massive AI compute infrastructure through Colossus, the Memphis supercomputer site that has become part of Musk's broader AI strategy.

This is where the IPO story stops being just a space story and becomes an AI infrastructure story.

The frontier AI race is no longer only about who has the smartest model. It is about who can secure chips, power, data centers, network capacity, and deployment speed. SpaceX already knows how to build massive physical systems faster than almost anyone. If that same operational machine is pointed at AI infrastructure, investors may start valuing SpaceX less like a space company and more like a new kind of industrial hyperscaler.

That sounds futuristic, but pieces of it are already visible.

Anthropic recently announced a major compute partnership with SpaceX tied to Colossus 1, describing more than 300 megawatts of new capacity and over 220,000 Nvidia GPUs coming online within the month. Anthropic also said it had expressed interest in partnering with SpaceX on multiple gigawatts of orbital AI compute capacity. That does not mean AI data centers in space are confirmed. The safe framing is that Anthropic expressed interest. But the fact that this is even being discussed tells you where the industry is headed.

AI companies are desperate for compute.

SpaceX has infrastructure.

That combination is extremely powerful.

There is also the Cursor angle. SpaceX reportedly has the right to buy Cursor, the AI coding tool made by Anysphere, for $60 billion later in 2026, or pay $10 billion to work together instead. If that happens, Musk's ecosystem would have rockets, satellites, compute, models, and one of the most important developer workflow products in AI.

That is why this moment feels bigger than a normal IPO.

A public SpaceX would not just give investors access to a rocket company. It would give them exposure to a bundle of the most important themes in the world: space, defense, broadband, AI compute, satellite networks, data infrastructure, and the Musk industrial ecosystem.

It would also put enormous pressure on other private companies.

If SpaceX can go public at a trillion-plus valuation and the market absorbs it, the next question becomes obvious: who is next?

OpenAI?

Anthropic?

Stripe?

Databricks?

A successful SpaceX IPO could reopen the public market for mega private tech companies that have stayed private for years while raising enormous sums from private investors. It would tell founders and bankers that the IPO window is open again, as long as the company has enough scale, growth, and narrative gravity.

But there are real risks.

SpaceX still has to prove public investors will tolerate the complexity of the story. Starship remains delayed relative to the most ambitious timelines. Starlink has to keep growing. Direct-to-cell has to become a real business. Defense work brings geopolitical scrutiny. xAI adds another layer of complexity. And Musk himself is always a volatility engine, both positive and negative.

That is the trade.

Investors get access to one of the most important private companies ever built. But they also inherit the full chaos premium of Elon Musk.

For Wall Street, the question is whether SpaceX should be valued like an aerospace company, a satellite internet company, a defense contractor, a telecom company, an AI infrastructure company, or a Musk-controlled industrial empire.

The honest answer is probably: all of the above.

That is what makes the valuation so difficult.

SpaceX has no clean public comparable. It is not Boeing. It is not Lockheed Martin. It is not Verizon. It is not Amazon Web Services. It is not Tesla. It borrows pieces from all of them, then adds the Mars vision on top.

This is why the IPO could become a defining market event.

If investors reject the valuation, it would be a warning that even the most exciting private companies still have limits when they meet public market scrutiny.

But if investors accept it, SpaceX could become the company that proves public markets are ready to value infrastructure, AI, and space as one combined mega-theme.

That would be a major shift.

For years, the space economy was treated as exciting but distant. Great for science fiction, NASA contracts, and occasional launch livestreams, but not central to the average investor's portfolio. SpaceX could change that overnight.

A $1.75 trillion SpaceX would tell the market that space is no longer a side category.

It is infrastructure.

It is communications.

It is defense.

It is AI.

It is global connectivity.

And it may be one of the next major arenas for trillion-dollar companies.

The clean takeaway is this: SpaceX going public would be one of the biggest financial events of the decade. Not because it is another tech IPO, but because it would give public investors direct exposure to the company that dominates rocket launches, leads satellite internet, and increasingly sits near the center of AI-era infrastructure.

If the market accepts the $1.75 trillion valuation, it will mean Wall Street is no longer valuing SpaceX as a rocket company.

It will be valuing SpaceX as a bet on the future physical layer of the internet, AI, defense, and space itself.

And if that bet works, SpaceX may not just become the biggest IPO in history.

It may become the company that forces every other frontier tech giant to ask whether it is finally time to go public too.

Clean Takeaway

SpaceX's IPO is not just about Elon Musk taking another company public. It is about whether Wall Street is ready to value space, satellite internet, AI infrastructure, and global communications as one combined mega-theme. Starlink gives SpaceX the recurring revenue engine. The launch business gives it the moat. xAI and compute infrastructure give it the future narrative. If investors buy the $1.75 trillion story, SpaceX becomes the public market symbol for the next industrial phase of technology.

Sources

Reply

or to participate.