- SpaceX completed record IPO, valued at $1.77 trillion.
- Company reported significant loss despite $18.7 billion revenue.
- Justifying valuation demands unprecedented 50% annual growth.
SpaceX IPO: SpaceX just completed the largest initial public offering in history. Elon Musk’s rocket and satellite company sold 555.6 million shares at $135 apiece, raising roughly $75 billion and shattering every IPO record in history. The listing values the company at approximately $1.77 trillion, a number that has left Wall Street both awestruck and deeply sceptical.
The milestone has also vaulted Musk into territory no individual has occupied before. His stake in SpaceX alone is now worth approximately $866 billion, and combined with his holdings in Tesla and other ventures, his total net worth will surpass $1.1 trillion once shares begin trading on NASDAQ on Friday, according to Forbes and Reuters calculations based on company filings.
Yet behind those record-breaking headlines lurks a question that even seasoned financial minds struggle to answer: can SpaceX ever grow large enough to justify what investors are being asked to pay? As Fortune has noted, doing so would require the company to outperform every business venture in the entire history of capitalism by a considerable margin.
A Company Valued at Trillions, That Lost Billions Last Year
SpaceX’s own filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission tells a sobering story. The company recorded a loss of $4.9 billion in 2024, even as it brought in $18.7 billion in revenue. For a firm asking the market to believe in a $1.77 trillion valuation, that gap is difficult to ignore.
Wall Street veteran and corporate financial expert David Trainer has put a precise number on just how wide that gap truly is. For SpaceX to represent a genuine investment with real returns, he argues, the company would need to reach annual revenues of $1.1 trillion, nearly 60 times what it earned in 2025, as reported by Futurism.
To put that in perspective: the highest annual revenue ever recorded by any company belongs to Amazon, which brought in $742 billion across its last four quarters. SpaceX would need to surpass even that figure, and then some.
Fifty Per Cent Growth, Every Year, For A Decade
Fortune’s estimates paint an even more striking picture of what hitting that target would actually demand. SpaceX would have to grow its sales by 50 per cent every single year for the next 10 years, a rate of sustained expansion that no company in history has come anywhere close to achieving.
By 2035, that trajectory would make SpaceX as large as an entire industry made up of dozens of Fortune 500 companies. According to Fortune’s projections, it would be over 50 per cent bigger than the entire utilities sector or the entertainment industry.
To get there, simply accelerating the growth of Starlink, its primary revenue engine, would not be nearly enough. SpaceX would need to build and scale entirely new revenue streams on an enormous scale, simultaneously and at speed.
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xAI, X, And The Weight Of New Liabilities
The challenge has grown considerably more complicated in recent months. Musk’s artificial intelligence venture xAI and his struggling social media platform X have both been folded into SpaceX, adding billions of dollars in fresh debt to its balance sheet alongside their ongoing costs and controversies.
Whether investors will look past these liabilities when SpaceX makes its NASDAQ debut remains to be seen. Some may baulk entirely at the scale of the proposition on offer. There is every chance that a meaningful number of traders will actively short the stock, wagering on its eventual decline rather than its rise.
Others, however, may see a very different kind of opportunity altogether.
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Hype, Hope, And The Retail Investor Gamble
Musk has a well-documented ability to inspire loyalty among retail investors, the ordinary individuals who buy shares through apps and brokerage accounts rather than institutional trading desks. That relationship could work significantly in SpaceX’s favour, at least in the near term, as enthusiasm and goodwill prop up the stock even where the fundamentals give pause.
The broader market context matters here too. Amid an ongoing AI hype cycle and a growing oil crisis, stock markets have increasingly decoupled from traditional business fundamentals. Speculation about ambitious, distant futures has become its own asset class.
In that environment, retail investors may not need to believe SpaceX will actually reach $1.1 trillion in revenues. They simply need to believe enough other people believe it, and that they can get out before reality catches up. Whether that bet pays off is, for now, anyone’s guess.
