SpaceX IPO Could Push a Speculative $2 Trillion Valuation Into Index Funds

SpaceX’s planned IPO is unlike prior market debuts not only because of its size. The offering is expected to raise as much as $75 billion, more than double the $29.4 billion Saudi Aramco raised in 2019, while targeting a valuation approaching $2 trillion. At the same time, the company is being valued at a cited 87 times sales, could become a major Nasdaq 100 index constituent, and is asking investors to price not just rockets and satellites but AI infrastructure, orbital data centers, and Mars-related ambitions.

Isabelle Lee calls it “the biggest IPO of all time.” Matt Goldman frames the offering as a test of whether hype is making the company seem worth more than it is. Bailey Lipschultz puts the tension more bluntly: investors are buying “the dream,” but the question is what the reality supports.

The filing described by Goldman gives that tension a concrete form. SpaceX is no longer presented as only a rocket company. The on-screen estimate of its total addressable market reaches $28.5 trillion, built from Starlink broadband, Starlink mobile, consumer subscriptions, digital advertising, AI infrastructure, space-enabled solutions, and enterprise applications. The largest category shown is enterprise applications at $22.7 trillion; AI infrastructure is shown at $2.4 trillion.

That breadth is central to the valuation case, but it also makes the offering harder to evaluate. Loren Grush says SpaceX today is “a very different company” from the one founded more than 20 years ago. It is, in her description, the world’s largest satellite operator through Starlink, with thousands of satellites in low Earth orbit providing broadband internet to the ground. It also operates rocket transportation services, sending cargo and humans to space.

The most expansive parts of the story are not the same as the operating businesses that already exist. Grush says Mars travel remains speculative and years away. She also says the IPO-related ambitions rely heavily on Starship, which she describes as perhaps “the most ambitious vehicle that’s ever been conceived for spaceflight,” meant to be fully reusable and therefore extremely complicated. Its development process, she says, has been rocky.

Chris Nagi captures the investment problem in one sentence: “So much of its value proposition is tied up in stuff that hasn’t quite happened yet.”

SpaceX has substantial operating businesses. The valuation question is whether those businesses, plus the company’s future markets, can support a public-market price far above ordinary mega-cap comparables.

According to Matt Goldman, SpaceX made a profit of $791 million after 2023, then lost $4.94 billion in 2025. Revenue still grew, from $14 billion in 2024 to $18.5 billion in 2025. The revenue chart shown on screen, attributed to company filings, points toward a higher estimated 2026 level, and Loren Grush gives the estimated projection as between $22 billion and $24 billion.

Those numbers mean SpaceX is not being described as a pre-revenue story. They do not settle whether a $2 trillion valuation is justified. Grush says the gap between projected revenue and the IPO valuation is “a very big discrepancy.”

Goldman compares SpaceX’s price-to-sales ratio with major technology companies. The on-screen Bloomberg chart shows Alphabet at 11.0x, Meta at 5.9x, Microsoft at 8.5x, Tesla at 15.1x, and Nvidia at 14.8x, with data as of May 20, 2026. SpaceX is shown at 87x.

That comparison is not presented as proof that the valuation is wrong. It is the market’s wager: SpaceX has existing businesses, but the valuation depends on future categories becoming very large.

For years, Bailey Lipschultz says, Elon Musk had said he did not plan to take SpaceX public. Lipschultz says that was before the merger with xAI, and before Musk needed tens of billions of dollars to build out the company’s expanded ambitions.

Loren Grush says SpaceX is “slowly becoming an AI company,” building data centers to train and operate AI in the future. In her account, the idea of using space as new real estate for AI data centers was the “game changer” that made Musk consider that now might be the time to go public.

The capital need is the hinge. SpaceX has rockets, satellites, Starlink, and transportation services, but Grush says executing the company’s ambitious goals will require more capital than those businesses may generate in a short period of time. The IPO, in that account, is part of the financing architecture for a company trying to move simultaneously into satellite broadband, space transportation, AI infrastructure, and potentially orbital data centers.

The index question matters because passive funds could become major buyers through index-tracking products. If SpaceX is added to the Nasdaq 100, investors with exposure to funds such as Invesco QQQ, which tracks the index, would have SpaceX exposure through that product rather than through a company-specific valuation decision.

Isabelle Lee explains that inclusion in indexes such as the S&P 500 or Nasdaq 100 can bring “millions and millions of dollars of passive funds.” Bailey Lipschultz says the consequence plainly: once the company is included in the Nasdaq 100, anyone buying QQQ is, by definition, investing in SpaceX “regardless of the valuation.”

The process for entering such indexes is itself changing. Lee says the old playbook required a newly public company to undergo a seasoning period, proving profitability and liquidity before possible index addition. The new playbook, as she describes it, is fast-track entry: Nasdaq changed its rules so a company does not need to be public for three months before joining the Nasdaq 100. SpaceX chose to list with Nasdaq.

Fast-tracking a company of this size is presented as unusual. Lee lists the risks: price mismatch, liquidity, crowding, and overconcentration in mega-cap names. The issue is not only whether SpaceX is a good company. It is whether passive-market mechanics can direct index-linked capital into a newly public stock even when buyers are not making a valuation-specific decision about SpaceX.

Chris Nagi says the market has become highly concentrated, which is “very worrisome” to many people. Lee makes the same point from the portfolio side: increasingly, holdings are concentrated in a few large companies, and those few companies determine the future of a portfolio.

SpaceX is described as an extreme case, but not an isolated one. Matt Goldman says the number of publicly listed companies in the US has fallen since the 1990s, a point supported by an on-screen Bloomberg chart showing the count declining from near 9,000 in the mid-1990s toward roughly half that level by the 2020s. Chris Nagi says companies that once would have gone public earlier can now stay private almost as long as they want because they have funding sources that do not require public investors.

Isabelle Lee describes the broader pattern: companies stay private, scale privately, raise privately, and then arrive in public markets already as mega-caps. In that context, SpaceX’s IPO could be a preview of other enormous offerings rather than a one-time anomaly.

Nagi points to Anthropic and OpenAI as companies that could produce “equally enormous IPOs” in the not very distant future, given their growth and the rate at which they are “replicating themselves.” On-screen Bloomberg article cards cite OpenAI being valued at $852 billion after completing a $122 billion round, and Anthropic being in talks to raise $30 billion at a $900 billion valuation.

The implication is structural. If enormous private companies become the rule for IPOs, public markets receive companies later, at higher valuations, with more of the early growth already priced in. Public investors may gain access to companies that are more mature, but they may also be asked to underwrite more ambitious projections at larger scale.

The bull case is not dismissed. Bailey Lipschultz says Musk has built a brand on turning science fiction into reality, and investors are willing to bet that even if he misses timelines, ambitions such as orbital data centers or a colony on Mars are not outside the realm of possibility.

That reputation helps explain why investors may accept a valuation that conventional multiples struggle to support. Chris Nagi gives the market logic: buy at a trillion, potentially sell at two trillion; if that keeps happening, SpaceX can make sense to a lot of people.

But Loren Grush identifies a direct conflict between public-market pressure and space development. Public companies face pressure to focus on short-term profits and maximizing shareholder returns. Space, by contrast, has long development lead times and requires room to fail. SpaceX has had explosions, and Grush notes that this does not always sit well with investors and shareholders.