SpaceX has confidentially filed paperwork with the Securities and Exchange Commission to sell shares to the public, according to multiple sources familiar with the registration, setting the stage for what would be the largest initial public offering in history and almost certainly making Elon Musk the world’s first trillionaire. The offering, internally code-named Project Apex, could come as early as June and reportedly aims to raise as much as $75 billion at a valuation of up to $1.75 trillion. That would more than double Saudi Aramco’s $29 billion listing in 2019, the current record holder, and would value SpaceX at roughly 94 times its 2025 revenue.
Twenty-one banks have lined up to manage the deal, with Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, and Citigroup in senior roles, according to CNBC. Musk, who owns approximately 42 per cent of SpaceX according to PitchBook, has a current net worth estimated by Forbes at $823 billion. At a $1.75 trillion valuation, his stake alone would be worth more than $730 billion, pushing his total wealth past the trillion-dollar mark and placing him further ahead of every other person alive than any individual in modern economic history.
The company filing for this listing, however, is no longer just a rocket business. In February, SpaceX absorbed Musk’s artificial intelligence company xAI in an all-stock transaction that valued the combined entity at $1.25 trillion. That deal, a merger that raised immediate questions about optics, governance, and valuation, folded a company reportedly burning roughly $1 billion a month into one generating substantial cash flow. SpaceX also brought Musk’s social media platform X, formerly Twitter, under the same corporate roof. The result is a conglomerate spanning orbital launches, satellite internet, defence contracts, artificial intelligence, and social media, all controlled by a single individual who is simultaneously the largest financial backer of the sitting president of the United States.
The financial engine behind the valuation is Starlink, the satellite internet service that has become the most commercially successful space venture in history. In 2025, Starlink generated $10.6 billion in revenue on 54 per cent EBITDA margins, accounting for roughly two-thirds of SpaceX’s total revenue of $16 billion. The subscriber base has grown from 10,000 beta users in 2021 to more than 10 million paying customers across 150 countries as of February 2026. The Federal Aviation Administration’s January 2026 approval for up to 44 annual Starship launches has provided the operational headroom investors needed to underwrite a public valuation at this scale.
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The xAI component of the entity going public is, by contrast, a work in progress. Musk himself said in March that xAI was “not built right the first time around” and needed to be rebuilt from its foundations. Since the merger, all 11 of xAI’s original co-founders have departed the company, including researchers who had previously worked at Google DeepMind, Google Brain, and Microsoft Research. Jimmy Ba, who co-authored the Adam optimisation paper, one of the most cited in all of artificial intelligence, left in February. Critics have characterised the merger as a financial bailout that allows xAI’s mounting losses to be absorbed by Starlink’s cash flow ahead of the IPO, a framing Musk has rejected.
The conflicts of interest embedded in this offering are without precedent in American capital markets. In the past five years alone, SpaceX has won $6 billion in contracts from NASA, the Department of Defense, and other federal agencies, according to USAspending.gov. The company is NASA’s primary launch provider for crewed missions to the International Space Station and holds more than $4 billion in contracts for the Artemis lunar-landing programme. The Pentagon is reportedly preparing to award SpaceX a $2 billion contract to build a 600-satellite constellation for missile tracking as part of the Golden Dome missile-defence initiative, a programme Trump announced would cost $175 billion and begin initial operations within three years.
Musk was the largest individual donor to Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign and led the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, a temporary body that unilaterally cancelled more than 10,000 federal contracts it deemed wasteful. Ethics observers noted that none of the cancellations affected Musk’s own companies. Among SpaceX’s current investors is Donald Trump Jr, the president’s eldest son, who holds shares through 1789 Capital, a venture firm that made him a partner shortly after his father won the presidency for a second time. That fund, which has crossed $1 billion in assets, has invested approximately $50 million in SpaceX and xAI and has backed at least four companies that subsequently received government contracts during the current administration. The White House has repeatedly denied any conflicts of interest between the presidency and the Trump family’s business activities.
The governance risks do not end at the political boundary. SpaceX under Musk has operated as a private company with minimal public disclosure for more than two decades. Going public will force it to file quarterly earnings, disclose executive compensation, open its books to auditors, and face shareholder lawsuits of the kind Tesla already contends with regularly. Tesla shareholders are currently suing Musk over the company’s $2 billion investment in xAI, arguing he directed shareholder capital into his own private venture. The SpaceX-xAI merger, in which both the buyer and seller were controlled by Musk, presents a similar structure of self-dealing that public-market investors and regulators already struggling with the pace of AI-era consolidation will scrutinise closely.
One unusual feature of the planned offering is the reported intention to allocate up to 30 per cent of shares to retail investors, roughly triple the typical 5 to 10 per cent. The move echoes Google’s unconventional 2004 IPO, which used a Dutch auction to broaden access, and appears designed to build a base of loyal individual shareholders who may be less inclined to challenge management. For a company whose founder has cultivated a large and vocal online following, the retail allocation could serve as both a democratisation of access and a governance insulation mechanism.
SpaceX’s listing would be the first of what could be a trio of mega-IPOs from the companies that defined the current era of AI and deep tech. OpenAI and Anthropic are both reportedly considering public offerings, though neither has filed. Together, the three listings would represent a concentration of market value in a handful of companies whose products, from orbital internet to frontier AI models, now intersect with national security, global communications, and the basic infrastructure of economic life.
The scale of what SpaceX is attempting is difficult to overstate. A $75 billion raise would exceed the gross domestic product of more than half the world’s countries. A $1.75 trillion valuation would make SpaceX more valuable at listing than every company in the S&P 500 except Apple, Microsoft, Nvidia, Amazon, and Alphabet. And at the centre of it all is a single individual who builds the rockets that carry American astronauts, runs the satellites that provide internet to war zones, leads an AI company he admits needs rebuilding, owns a social media platform that shapes political discourse, and has the mobile-phone number of the president.
Whether that concentration of power, capital, and government dependency can survive the scrutiny of public markets is the question Project Apex will ultimately answer. The defence-tech sector is already drawing record investment on the thesis that the next generation of military capability will be built by private companies rather than government labs. SpaceX is the largest and most consequential test of that thesis. If the IPO succeeds on the terms being discussed, it will not merely be the biggest stock offering in history. It will be a statement about the degree to which twenty-first-century governments have outsourced their most critical capabilities to the private sector, and about the price of getting them back.
