SpaceX is planning to raise tens of billions of dollars in an initial public offering next year, multiple outlets said, and Ars can confirm. This marks a major shift in the thinking of the world’s leading space company and its founder, Elon Musk.
Wall Street Journal AND Information we first learned of a possible public offering last Friday, and Bloomberg followed suit this information was raised on Tuesday evening along with a report suggesting that the company would target a valuation of $1.5 trillion. This would allow SpaceX to raise more than $30 billion.
This is a huge amount of resources. The largest IPO in history took place in 2019, when the state oil company of Saudi Arabia began public listing under the name Aramco and raised $29 billion. In terms of revenue, Aramco is among the top five companies in the world.
Now SpaceX has the potential to meet or exceed that figure. That SpaceX would be attractive to public investors is no surprise – it is the world’s dominant space company in launches, space communications and much more. For investors seeking unlimited growth, space is the final frontier.
But why would Musk take SpaceX public now, at a time when the company’s revenues are growing thanks to the development of the Starlink internet constellation? The decision is surprising because Musk has long refrained from making information about SpaceX public. He disliked the public attention toward Tesla and feared that shareholder desires for financial returns would not align with his ultimate goal of inhabiting Mars.
Data centers
Ars spoke to a number of people familiar with Musk and his thinking to understand why he would want to take SpaceX public.
A significant change in recent years is the development of artificial intelligence, in which Musk has been involved since 2015, when he co-founded OpenAI. He later had a falling out with his co-founders and founded his own company, xAI, in 2023. At Tesla, he develops smart driving technology, and recently focused on robotics. Musk sees a convergence of these technologies in the near future, which he believes will profoundly change civilization.
Raising enormous amounts of money over the next 18 months will enable Musk to have significant capital to deploy in SpaceX as he influences and participates in this technology convergence.
How can SpaceX play in this space? In the near future, the company plans to develop a modified version of the Starlink satellite, which will constitute the basis for the construction of data centers in space. Musk said the same thing in overdue October on his social network X: “SpaceX will do it.”