Funding & Finance

SpaceX IPO: The $1.75 Trillion Meme Stock?

The SpaceX IPO is asking for $75 billion. That is more than three times the largest IPO in history.

By Conor Healy

April 22, 2026

SpaceX IPO: The $1.75 Trillion Meme Stock?

The SpaceX IPO is asking for $75 billion. That is more than three times the largest IPO in history. Alibaba raised $22 billion. Visa raised $18 billion. No company has ever asked investors for this much money at once.

The SpaceX IPO roadshow begins the week of June 8, 2026. The target valuation: $1.75 trillion. At that price, the stock would trade at 219 times earnings. Nvidia, the most hyped company in AI, trades at 30 times. Retail investors in the US, UK, EU, Australia, Canada, Japan, and Korea will have access to the offering. SpaceX filed confidentially with the SEC on April 1. The prospectus goes public in late May.

Those are the numbers. Here is why they matter: SpaceX is building a shareholder base of true believers, and the valuation only makes sense if you are one of them.

The Bull Case

Start with what SpaceX has actually built. The company made roughly $8 billion profit on $16 billion revenue in 2025. Starlink, the satellite internet service, generated an estimated $10.6 billion of that revenue with a 54% EBITDA margin. Those are software-company margins from a hardware business.

Starlink now operates over 9,600 satellites. No competitor is close. The economics work because SpaceX can launch its own satellites cheaper than anyone else. Reusable rockets changed the cost structure of space. In 2025, SpaceX conducted 165 orbital flights. The company has received over $24.4 billion in government contracts since 2008, spanning NASA, the Air Force, and Space Force.

Greg Martin of Rainmaker Securities, which specialises in private market transactions, explained why demand for SpaceX shares consistently outpaces supply: “You’ve got a highly defensible, massive operating scale business, a multitude of major TAM expansion opportunities, with a continuously evolving story.”

The bull case is that Starlink is not just an internet provider. It is infrastructure. Once the constellation is in orbit, each new subscriber adds high-margin recurring revenue with near-zero marginal cost. PitchBook noted that Starlink “creates recurring internal demand that justifies large-scale capital expenditure, and it forces SpaceX to behave like a high-volume manufacturer rather than a bespoke aerospace producer.”

Antoine Grenier, partner at Analysys Mason, argued the timing makes sense: “For Starlink, it’s only quite recently been clear that the business model is sustainable and does work. The Starlink business model is established and it has further growth. That’s perfect timing for an IPO.”

If you believe Starlink will dominate global satellite internet, and that SpaceX’s cost advantage is durable, then the valuation is a bet on a decades-long monopoly. Monopolies command premium multiples.

The Bear Case

The problem is that $1.75 trillion does not follow from $8 billion in profit, even with monopoly assumptions. That valuation requires belief in things that do not yet exist.

The IPO narrative includes two major future bets. The first is orbital data centres: up to one million satellites providing space-based AI computing. The second is Moonbase Alpha, a plan to establish a human colony on the moon. Neither has a clear revenue model. Both require technology that has not been built.

NYU finance professor Aswath Damodaran summarised the ask: “SpaceX is asking investors to price in not just Starlink’s current revenue, but the entire future of orbital connectivity, Mars colonisation, and now artificial intelligence through xAI.”

The xAI merger complicates things further. In February 2026, SpaceX merged with Musk’s artificial intelligence company in an all-stock transaction valued at approximately $250 billion. That merger transformed SpaceX from a space logistics company into something harder to define. The combined entity now spans rockets, satellites, AI, and social media through X.

Industry sources estimate xAI burns approximately $1 billion per month on compute infrastructure for training large language models. SpaceX’s core business is profitable. The combined entity may not be.

The Motley Fool put it bluntly: “SpaceX could be the ultimate meme stock.” Their recommendation: avoid. “If you look back at big IPOs in 2025, many opened big and then sold off after a few months, as the hype faded or lock-up provisions expired. I expect SpaceX will be no different, and potentially in a more magnified way.”

Georgetown finance professor Reena Aggarwal cautioned that timing matters: “You can have a great company, with great fundamentals and a lot of investor interest, and an IPO can still flop if the markets have turned south, if there’s too much volatility in the market.”

Retail By Design

What makes the SpaceX IPO unusual is how explicitly it targets retail investors. CFO Bret Johnsen told bankers in a meeting that retail will be “a bigger part than any IPO in history.” He explained the reasoning: “Those are folks that have been incredibly supportive of us and of Elon for a long time, and we want to make sure that we recognise that.”

SpaceX plans to host 1,500 retail investors at an event on June 11, following the roadshow launch. Everyday investors in the US, UK, EU, Australia, Canada, Japan, and Korea will have access to the offering. One of the lead underwriters told the 21 investment banks on the deal that retail demand and allocation will be “something they’ve never seen before.”

This is not incidental. Retail investors are being courted because they buy on belief. Institutional investors run discounted cash flow models. Retail investors buy the mission.

Analyst Tim Farrar of TMF Associates noted that some of Musk’s projections, like tens of thousands of Starships per year, are “outrageous” by any conventional standard. But he sees that as intentional: “You want people to invest in an IPO who are true believers in everything Elon Musk says. And if people are put off by those sort of statements, then they probably won’t be investing in the IPO.”

This is meme stock mechanics. The valuation filters for believers. Sceptics self-select out. What remains is a shareholder base that will hold through volatility because they are not investing in a company. They are investing in a vision.

The Market Impact

Professor Shaun Davies of the University of Colorado’s Leeds School of Business warned that the SpaceX IPO could have effects beyond the company itself: “It could effectively shut down the IPO market for the rest of 2026 and into 2027.”

The reasoning is simple. SpaceX will absorb an enormous amount of capital. If the offering succeeds, it validates high-multiple pricing and could open the door for other long-delayed tech IPOs. Many large private companies have been waiting years to go public. Many investors have been waiting even longer to get their capital back.

If the IPO fails, it does the opposite. It discourages other companies from going public and stalls the pipeline.

Davies put the stakes plainly: “Twenty years from now, we’ll talk about the SpaceX IPO.”

The Verdict

SpaceX is a real company with real revenue and real profits. It has reshaped the economics of space launch. Starlink has built a genuine competitive moat. The government contracts provide stability. The business case exists.

But $1.75 trillion is not a business case. It is a bet on orbital data centres, moon bases, Mars colonies, and the belief that Elon Musk will deliver all of it. The retail-heavy structure ensures the shareholder base will be composed of people who already believe.

Kimberly Siversen Burke, a space industry analyst, noted that SpaceX needs capital “on a pretty large scale if it wants to do at the same time Starlink V3, the expansion of Starship, and even bolder plans for space exploration. An IPO is that one time when you can raise a lot more capital in one go, on a totally different scale.”

The capital will arrive. Whether the returns follow is another matter.

For investors who believe Musk will build moon bases and orbital data centres, the SpaceX IPO is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to buy in. For investors who think those projections are marketing, this is GameStop at scale: a functioning business buried under a valuation that requires miracles.

That is what makes a meme stock. Not the company. The shareholder base. SpaceX may be the first meme stock with a real business underneath. Whether that makes it a better investment or a more dangerous one depends entirely on which side of the belief divide you stand.