On Thursday, SpaceX officially filed to go public at a valuation of $1.75 trillion…
Meaning if the listing succeeds, it’ll be the sixth largest company in America on its first day of trading.
Bigger than Meta…
Bigger than Tesla…
Bigger than every bank, retailer and pharmaceutical company on earth.
I've read through the S-1 (that's the document a company is required to file with regulators before selling shares to the public), and what struck me wasn't the headline number.
It was how much of that $1.75 trillion depends on things that don't yet exist...
If you’re not aware, SpaceX filed as three businesses, not one.
There's Starlink which brought in $11.4 billion in 2025… grew revenue by 49.8% year-over-year… and generated $4.4 billion in operating profit. Which is clearly the crown jewel of the company right now.
Then there's the rocket launch division, which did $4.1 billion in revenue and lost $657 million. I’m not concerned because rocket companies are expensive.
Then there's the AI segment which consists of xAI, Grok and the remnants of X/Twitter — which did $3.2 billion in revenue and roughly double that in losses.
Now the AI division claims access to a total addressable market of $28.5 trillion.
And 93% of that figure comes from markets that don't currently exist…
Areas like orbital manufacturing and asteroid mining.
But the detail that should concern any retail investor most has nothing to do with rockets or AI…
It's about how the stock will enter the market.
Index funds hold roughly $24 trillion in assets. So when a company joins one of those indexes, every fund tracking it is legally required to buy shares.
SpaceX is reportedly demanding immediate inclusion in the Nasdaq 100 as a condition of listing on the exchange. Nasdaq is reportedly rewriting its own eligibility rules — creating a so-called "Fast Entry" provision — specifically to accommodate this demand.
Normally a company must trade publicly for twelve months before S&P 500 eligibility.
SpaceX wants to bypass that entirely.
What that means is trillions of dollars in passive money would be forced to buy SpaceX shares at whatever price they open at on June 12th, before the market has had any real time to figure out what the stock is worth.
With only 5-10% of shares are available to trade freely at launch and huge numbers of forced enormous forced buyers plus a tiny supply… the price goes up.
Starlink is genuinely a world-class business. At 10.3 million subscribers and growing, it's the most important satellite internet provider ever built. The launch division, if Starship achieves commercial flight cadence in the second half of this year, has a real case for long-term value.
But the filing prices SpaceX at 90 to 100 times its total revenue. For reference, when Facebook went public in 2012, it listed at 11 times revenue. Google listed at 5.6 times revenue.
Even today, both Anthropic and OpenAI trade at roughly half that value.
I’ll continue to watch this one carefully.
Not because I think SpaceX will fail (I don't) but there’s a big difference between a great company and a great investment at this price
SpaceX is the former… and I’ll be waiting for the valuation to moderate before taking a position.
Oliver