SpaceX’s $1.8 Trillion IPO Case Depends on Long-Dated Market Creation

SpaceX is now said to be targeting an IPO valuation of at least $1.8 trillion, below an earlier reported ambition above $2 trillion. Benedikt Kammel framed the change less as a fundamental reset than as part of the pricing choreography that happens close to a listing. The offering, he said, is “a couple of days off,” with pricing expected to settle in the next few days, leaving investment banks and buyers trying to read demand and momentum before the final number is fixed.

Kammel’s point was not that a few hundred billion dollars is trivial in ordinary terms. It was that, against the scale being discussed, the difference between $1.8 trillion and “more than two trillion” does not alter the basic premise of the deal. He described the reported lower figure as “almost a rounding error” when the frame is already measured in trillions.

That does not make the number settled. Kammel said the latest number being heard was $1.8 trillion, while noting that Elon Musk had responded to the reporting with a one-word denial: “false.” Kammel left the dispute unresolved: “we’ll have to see who’s right in the end.”

The Bloomberg Tech visual shown with the discussion placed the potential listing process on a compressed schedule, while also labeling it “subject to change.”

1. May 20
   Company files publicly.
2. June 4
   Formal marketing begins.
3. June 11
   Prices IPO.
4. June 12
   Lists shares.

Kammel described the current moment as a “positioning game.” The reported number, in his account, may reflect investment banks and buyers trying to judge momentum. It might also be a case of coming in with lower expectations and then beating them. Either way, his account treated the reported reduction as part of price discovery rather than as a definitive signal that investors have rejected the company’s broader story.

The reported IPO figures sit beside projections that Kammel called “mind-boggling.” He said the valuation was only one of the large numbers associated with the listing; another was a total addressable market figure of $28 trillion. He characterized some of these as “utopist numbers,” meaning they rely on an expansive vision of what SpaceX could become rather than on the company’s current revenue base alone.

That distinction matters because the present business, as described by Tim Stenovec, does not by itself make the multiple look modest. Stenovec cited expected 2025 revenue of $18.7 billion, up from $14 billion in 2024. At a $1.8 trillion valuation, he calculated, SpaceX would trade at roughly 96 times sales. He contrasted that with software companies, which he said are “typically” around 10 times sales.

The exchange therefore centered on a basic valuation tension: even the reportedly more conservative number still implies a very high price relative to current revenue. Stenovec put the question directly: if this is the lower valuation, and the multiple is still about 96 times sales, is the opportunity investors are paying for realistic?

Kammel accepted the premise that the key word is “opportunity.” His answer was that buyers would not be purchasing SpaceX based on “where things stand right now,” but on what the business might be in five, 10, or 20 years. The valuation, on that view, prices a possible future category rather than a mature business with conventional public-market multiples.

Benedikt Kammel’s strongest explanation for investor willingness to entertain the valuation was Elon Musk’s track record. If there is one thing Musk has “shown and has proven,” Kammel said, it is that he can “build a market from very little or nothing.” He pointed to Tesla as the example, then said Musk “might do so again now with space exploration.”

That argument is not presented as a guarantee. Kammel emphasized that “a lot of things” would have to go right. The prospectus, as he described it, included ambitions such as putting a million people on Mars. He called that “future fantasies” and “future thinking,” language that preserved both the speculative nature of the claim and the reason investors may still find it relevant.

The valuation case, in Kammel’s account, is not merely that SpaceX has revenue growth. It is that some investors may be assigning value to a much larger possible market, including space exploration and more ambitious off-planet projects, that current revenue does not capture.

Kammel did not say that this future will arrive. He said that if SpaceX can pull off “some of those things,” then a valuation that looks extremely lofty now “might not seem quite as lofty” later. The conditional is the point. The reported $1.8 trillion valuation is still enormous; the reduction from a possible $2 trillion-plus target does not make the IPO conventionally cheap. It makes the question sharper: whether investors in the IPO process will value SpaceX primarily against $18.7 billion in expected 2025 revenue, or against the long-dated opportunity Kammel described when citing the $28 trillion total addressable market figure and the prospectus’s Mars ambitions.