SpaceX Just Priced the Largest IPO in History. Here's What $1.77 Trillion Buys You.

The S-1 gives us the cleanest look yet at Starlink, which did $11.4 billion in revenue in 2025 with $4.4 billion in operating income. That's a real business with real margins, and it's the part of SpaceX you can value with a straight face. Launch revenue is steadier than it used to be but lumpier than satellite subscriptions, and Starship remains a capital furnace.

Then there's the part you can't value with a straight face. SpaceX absorbed xAI in February in an all-stock deal that valued the combined company at $1.25 trillion. Four months later, the IPO prices the whole thing at $1.77 trillion. Some of that gap is IPO froth. Some of it is the market deciding that a rocket company fused to an AI lab deserves a premium neither would get alone. I honestly can't tell you which share is bigger, and I'm not sure the underwriters can either.

Musk keeps the wheel

Elon Musk is selling no shares and retains full voting control through a dual-class structure. Public investors are buying economic exposure, not influence. That arrangement drew complaints during the roadshow and will draw more the first time the stock drops 15 percent on something Musk posted at 2 a.m.

It also didn't stop the book from being heavily oversubscribed, which tells you what institutional investors actually think about governance risk when the asset is scarce enough.

The AI angle nobody should skip

The xAI piece matters more than the launch business for anyone reading this site. SpaceX now owns one of the handful of frontier AI labs, plus the launch capacity to put compute, sensors, and communications anywhere it wants. The S-1 leans on that combination hard. Whether orbital data centers ever pencil out is an open question, but the option on them is now publicly traded.

It also resets the scoreboard for the rest of the industry. Anthropic filed confidentially on June 1 at a $965 billion private valuation. OpenAI announced its own filing a week later at $852 billion. Both of them now have a public comp, and that comp opened at $1.77 trillion. Expect every AI banker in Manhattan to have the SPCX chart open for the next six months.

Ignore the opening pop

Friday's open will produce a number, and the number will be silly in one direction or the other. Ignore it. The things worth watching are slower: whether Starlink margins hold as competition arrives, whether Starship flies often enough to matter commercially, and whether the xAI merger produces anything beyond a bigger denominator.

A $75 billion raise buys a lot of runway. It doesn't buy the answers.