SpaceX, the aerospace company founded by Elon Musk 24 years ago, has finally released its IPO filing. If the company goes public, Mr. Musk will play a central role in the company as CEO, CTO, and chairman of the board.
The large number of applications, filed after the market closed on Wednesday, shows that the company has evolved far beyond its initial pursuit of reusable rockets, although its long-term mission to create a multiplanetary species remains intact. SpaceX is now a technology conglomerate focused on satellites and AI, and one of the most valuable private companies in the world.
If it goes public on the Nasdaq exchange later this year, it will become one of the most valuable publicly traded companies. (Currently, NVIDIA holds the title with a market capitalization of $5.4 trillion.) SpaceX chose “SPCX” as its listing stock.
The regulatory filing, known as an S-1, provides the clearest and most financially transparent public dissection of SpaceX’s business to date. And this comes just weeks before what is expected to be the largest IPO in history, both in terms of potential raised (expected to be about $75 billion) and overall valuation (reportedly $1.75 trillion). The document contains 36 pages of risk factors to SpaceX’s business and details the legal battles the company faces after taking over Musk’s artificial intelligence and social media company. SpaceX says the lawsuit will likely cost $530 million.
Many of the major news details have been reported in the weeks since SpaceX first filed a confidential version of its S-1 filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on April 1st. As Reuters reported last month, the company lost about $4.9 billion in 2025 on revenue of more than $18 billion.
The filing details the business currently dominated by SpaceX’s Starlink satellite internet service, which generated more than half of the company’s revenue last year, about $11 billion. It also shows how much SpaceX has spent to get to this point. More than $37 billion has been lost since its inception, according to S-1.
And xAI, the artificial intelligence company founded by Elon Musk and recently merged with SpaceX, isn’t helping on this front. SpaceX has allocated about 60% of its 2025 capital spending, or about $20 billion, to its AI division, according to filings. But the division, which includes the chatbot Grok, lost billions of dollars last year and only grew revenue by about 22%. This is far below the revenue growth rate reported by Frontier AI Labs.
But the company unsurprisingly makes a number of astronomical promises in its filing. One of the biggest? It said it had “identified the largest viable total market size in human history” at $28.5 trillion. The company attributes a huge portion of this, $22.7 trillion, to “enterprise applications” of AI.
it’s all about rockets
Despite the complexity of SpaceX’s business, much of its future depends on the success of Starship, a fully reusable heavy-lift rocket that has undergone a number of explosions and technological improvements over the past few years. The company is expected to conduct Starship’s 12th launch as early as this week, and has a lot riding on its success.
SpaceX said in its filing that it expects Starship to begin delivering payloads to orbit in late 2026, with little margin for error. Assuming SpaceX can reach that milestone, the company plans to use Starship to send Starlink broadband satellites into orbit in the second half of 2026 and begin sending next-generation V2 mobile satellites into orbit in 2027.
SpaceX’s Starship program goes far beyond launching satellites. The company hopes to use the rapidly reusable spacecraft, designed to carry 100 metric tons into Earth’s orbit, to explore Mars or launch an orbiting AI data center into space.
Pursuing that goal has been costly for SpaceX, according to the S-1 filing. The company’s space division has invested heavily in research and development for the Starship program, spending $3 billion in 2025 and $930 million in the first quarter of 2026.
In SpaceX’s view, the cost is worth it. The company said Starship is critical to reducing the cost of reaching orbit by more than 99% compared to historical average launch costs.
starry vision
S-1 details SpaceX’s many extreme goals, including multiplanetary life, reaching the moon and Mars, and building an orbital network of satellites capable of performing space-based computing.
But the application includes other flashy, futuristic ideas.
SpaceX appears to remain interested in using its Starship rocket as a ground transportation system, an idea that Musk first proposed in 2017. The company says it plans to “develop ultra-high-speed, long-range, point-to-point global transportation using Starship, allowing passengers and cargo to travel between major cities in a fraction of today’s transit time, revolutionizing global logistics and passenger travel with unprecedented speed and efficiency.”
The company has flagged the idea as a “future market,” so it’s not in its near-term outlook. As a result, the benefits and risks of the idea of point-to-point travel have not received the same scrutiny in applications as SpaceX’s core business.
Another “future market” is “space tourism.” SpaceX has used this in the past to allow civilians to fly into space on its Dragon spacecraft. He once planned a mission around the moon with Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa, but it was canceled long before it could be realized. SpaceX said in its filing that it expects “interest in human space travel will increase as access to space becomes easier and more common.”
SpaceX executives also believe the company could one day set up manufacturing facilities in orbit, on the moon or on Mars.
“We aim to exploit the unique microgravity conditions of space to establish a space manufacturing facility to produce materials, pharmaceuticals, and advanced components that are difficult or impossible to manufacture on Earth, and to develop new high-value industrial markets,” the application states. Facilities on the Moon and Mars will be focused on producing solar energy, as well as fuel, construction materials and other “essential resources.”
Finally, SpaceX believes it may someday be involved in asteroid mining operations. This is also listed as another “future market,” but few details have been released about how SpaceX plans to approach this idea.
total control
Don’t get me wrong, this is Elon Musk’s company. After the IPO, Musk will become SpaceX’s CEO, CTO and chairman of the board, according to the filing.
The S-1 shows he owns 93.6% of SpaceX’s Class B stock, which carries 10 votes per share. Therefore, Musk currently controls 85.1% of SpaceX’s voting rights. That number is expected to decline after the IPO, but it will remain above 50%, allowing SpaceX to avoid certain rules about having independent directors on its board.
He was also handed a new compensation package earlier this year, which will see him get 1 billion Class B shares if he can successfully raise the value of SpaceX to $7.5 trillion and “establish a permanent human colony on Mars with at least 1 million people.” He could earn even more stock if the company can build a space-based data center capable of delivering “100 terawatts of computing per year.”
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