By Al Root
SpaceX's public market debut, quite possibly the capital markets event of the century, has moved one step closer completion. The S-1 IPO registration statement for Elon Musk's rocket company SpaceX arrived late Wednesday afternoon.
Investors can download it here.
A lack of ambition isn't something to worry about. SpaceX is going after what it describes as a $28.5 trillion addressable market "to build the systems and technologies necessary to make life multiplanetary, to understand the true nature of the universe, and to extend the light of consciousness to the stars."
The IPO is expected to raise a record amount of money, valuing Elon Musk's company at roughly $2 trillion -- enough to turn the world's richest person into a trillionaire. SpaceX plans to use the money to put artificial-intelligence data centers in space. Musk has shared his vision of "sustainable abundance," with virtual and physical AI applications expanding the economy to the point where everyone has enough of everything.
It's a given that the IPO is a big deal. Here are few things investors already know, along with what to watch for.
The Stock Symbol
The debate is over. The symbol won't be X or SPACE. The company is going with SPCX. Shares will be listed on the Nasdaq and Nasdaq Texas.
Nasdaq Texas is a legally domiciled equity exchange venue in the state of Texas. Listing there can provide companies with some relief from exchange rules on corporate governance.
Elon Musk Is In Complete Control
Investors and Wall Street analysts point out that Musk is Tesla and Tesla is Musk. The same goes for SpaceX. Exactly what SpaceX would be worth without Musk is hard to say, but it wouldn't be $2 trillion.
Musk will be well compensated for his visionary leadership and for hitting some audacious goals. If Musk takes SpaceX to a market value of $7.5 trillion and hits some other milestones -- including a permanent Mars colony -- he will earn one billion shares. There is also a 302-million-share award for orbital data center computing capacity reaching 100 terawatts.
It's a very Tesla-like incentive structure. In 2025, Tesla shareholders voted to award Musk 424 million shares if he hit various goals, including an $8.5 trillion market value. (The grant was valued at $158 billion by accountants. That's fun with numbers.) If Musk reaches his goals, that stock would be worth roughly $1 trillion.
The SpaceX award looks to be about half that valuable, but Musk already owns a lot of SpaceX stock. He holds 85% of the Class B stock and 12.3% of the Class A stock. Class B stock has super-voting rights. Combined, Musk holds 41% of SpaceX shares, before the IPO, and controls 85% of the vote. What's more, class B holders are entitled to elect a majority of board members.
SpaceX has about 6.9 billion Class A shares and 6.5 Class B shares outstanding. The other class B shareholders are Chief Operating Officer Gwynne Shotwell and board member Ira Ehrenpreis.
It's an incredible level of control that investors would be hard-pressed to find in publicly traded companies.
Interplanetary Goals and Business Strategy
Monetizing Mars will be difficult for now. SpaceX will need other businesses to generate the profits and free cash flow for exploration.
The company is already dominant in launch services, accounting for more than half of the world's orbital launches. Starlink, SpaceX's space-based broadband product with more than 10 million customers and some 10,000 operational satellites
xAI, which SpaceX merged with in February, isn't profitable. It will be the source of most of the losses and cash burn, although SpaceX is also spending billions to develop Starship, the largest rocket ever made by humans. The goal is to reduce the cost to reach orbit by 90% compared with SpaceX's Falcon 9. That's after the Falcon had lowered the cost to reach space by more than 95%, relative to NASA's Space Shuttle.
xAI is losing money, but the future and the valuation of SpaceX hinge on AI. Musk has predicted that space-based computing will be cheaper than terrestrial computing in a few years. Satellites can be powered directly by the sun, without paying a utility bill.
xAI Drives Losses
SpaceX reported first-quarter sales of $4.7 billion, up 15% year over year. The operating loss was $1.9 billion, down from a profit of $27 million in Q1 2025.
Sales in 2025 totaled almost $19 billion. The operating loss was $2.6 billion. Most of that loss came from xAI. The launch business was profitable in 2024 and lost $657 million in 2025. Starlink is very profitable, generating $4.4 billion in 2025 operating profit, up more than 100% year over year. xAI lost $6.4 billion in 2025, up from a $1.6 billion loss in 2024.
Estimating how all the businesses added up was hard. Investors essentially knew Starlink was profitable. It's likely SpaceX was profitable in 2025, before it bought xAI. What SpaceX looks like with xAI inside it is hard to say.
The company ended the first quarter with about $16 billion in cash, down from $25 billion at the end of 2025. Liabilities totaled $60 billion. The liability number might be a little surprising, but most of those liabilities appear to come from xAI. Don't forget xAI merged with debt-laden X, formerly Twitter, in 2025.
And More...
It will take investors a while to go through the document. They will surely find other things of interest, such as plans to launch a payment app on X.
Write to Al Root at allen.root@dowjones.com
This content was created by Barron's, which is operated by Dow Jones & Co. Barron's is published independently from Dow Jones Newswires and The Wall Street Journal.
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
May 20, 2026 19:44 ET (23:44 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2026 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
Comments