SpaceX Gears Up for Massive IPO This Year. What We Know So Far.Tesla, Inc.NASDAQ:TSLATradingViewAt some point in the next few months, you may have the opportunity to own a piece of a rocket company. Not just any rocket company. It’s the biggest privately-held rocket company that lands boosters on drone ships in the middle of the ocean and has made reusable spaceflight so routine that the launches barely make the news anymore. SpaceX SPACEX has confidentially filed IPO paperwork with the Securities and Exchange Commission, and if everything goes to plan, shares could be trading by July. It’s the largest initial public offering in history and the most retail-friendly. 📋 The Confidential Filing An IPO, or initial public offering, is the process by which a private company sells, or floats, shares to the public for the first time. Before it can do that, it has to file detailed financial and business disclosures with the SEC, the US markets regulator. SpaceX has done this confidentially, which is standard practice and perfectly legal. The confidential route allows the company and regulators to have a back-and-forth dialogue about disclosures without the whole world watching over their shoulders. The practical consequence for most investors is that the financials stay private until closer to the listing date. SpaceX plans to make its prospectus, the formal document laying out the business, risks, and financials for prospective investors, public in late May. The IPO roadshow, the week of investor presentations where executives and bankers pitch the offering to institutional buyers, is expected to launch the week of June 8. A market debut by July is the goal. 💰 The Numbers SpaceX SPACEX is targeting an IPO raise of between $40 billion and $80 billion, according to the Wall Street Journal. That range alone would make it the largest IPO ever recorded, surpassing Saudi Aramco's $29.4 billion raise in 2019. On the valuation question, Elon Musk himself stepped in on X to dismiss a Bloomberg report suggesting SpaceX was targeting a valuation above $2 trillion. "Don't believe everything you read. Bloomberg publishes bs," Musk wrote, with characteristic restraint. What is less contested: SpaceX last year generated earnings of $4 to $5 billion, with EBITDA, a measure of operating profitability before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortisation, of $8 billion. Revenue was $15 billion to $16 billion, according to a Reuters report. A valuation above $1.5 trillion looks ambitious against those numbers, implying a multiple of roughly 185 times earnings (or above 300, depending on your metrics of choice). But SpaceX is not being valued as a mature business. It is being valued as an infrastructure monopoly for the next century of space activity, which is a different animal entirely. One notable side effect of a $1.5 trillion valuation: Musk, who owns roughly 43% of SpaceX, would instantly become the world's first trillionaire. 🚀 The xAI Merger Before the IPO news, SpaceX made a different kind of headline. In February, SpaceX merged with Musk's artificial intelligence company xAI in what became the largest corporate tie-up by value in US history, creating a combined entity valued at $1.25 trillion. xAI, which operates the Grok AI chatbot and competes directly with OpenAI and Anthropic, needed more financial firepower to stay in the race. Attaching it to SpaceX, which generates cash and owns critical infrastructure including the Starlink satellite internet network, solves that problem. What do you own when you buy into the SpaceX IPO? You buy a rocket company fused with an AI company sitting on a global broadband network. And data centers in orbit. 👥 The Retail Investor Play One key detail sets this IPO apart from most. SpaceX plans to reserve a significant portion of shares for retail investors, meaning ordinary individual investors rather than institutional funds. Reuters reported that Musk wants to set aside up to 30% of shares for smaller investors, compared with the 5% to 10% that most companies allocate. The company also plans to host 1,500 retail investors at an event in June, following the roadshow launch. Most large IPOs are dominated by institutional allocations, with retail investors getting whatever is left over after the big funds have been served. 🌐 The Three Mega-IPOs SpaceX would be the first of three potential mega-offerings in 2026. OpenAI and Anthropic, the two most prominent AI companies, are both reportedly considering IPOs before year-end. Watch the IPO calendar to keep track of all dates you need to know. If all three list in 2026, it would represent an extraordinary concentration of market-defining (who said market-tanking?) companies entering public markets in a single year. 🎯 The Outlook If the prospectus drops in late May, the details to look into are the Starlink revenue trajectory, which represents the most scalable part of the business, the financial structure of the xAI integration, and how the company accounts for its government contracts, which include substantial NASA and Department of Defense relationships. The risk factors section, which every prospectus contains and most investors skip, will also be worth reading in this case. A company whose core business involves putting big things into orbit, competing in AI, operating a global satellite network, and being led by arguably the most polarizing CEO on the planet has a risk factor section that will be, at minimum, interesting. The IPO of the decade may or may not be priced at $2 trillion. But it will definitely be worth paying attention to. Off to you: How do you see the IPO drop? A massive pump or a massive dump? And are you looking to snag some shares?