SpaceX’s IPO Is Musk’s Most Audacious Product Launch Yet

On Monday night, a crew of four astronauts on NASA’s Orion spacecraft traveled around the moon for the first time in 50 years. The Artemis II mission is the latest stage of NASA’s attempt to return humans to the moon—and a made-for-TV demonstration of the space agency’s engineering prowess.

Awkwardly for Elon Musk, his rocket company played no part in the milestone, which may be why he was initially pretty quiet about NASA’s success amid his usual social media output of political provocations and AI-generated pictures of scantily clad women. Behind the scenes, though, Musk is engaged in a feat of financial engineering that is as improbable as any trip to the far side of the moon, if not more so.

As the NASA crew hurtles home, Musk is racing toward an initial public offering for SpaceX that could value it at around $2 trillion (or perhaps even more). That’s roughly five times what the company was worth last year—an increase in valuation that reflects less the success of its core business and more the extreme frothiness of the artificial intelligence market and Musk’s attempt to quickly pivot his decades-old rocket company into a vehicle for investor speculation. Musk, who’d long insisted he would never take SpaceX public—at least not until it had established a Mars colony—appears to be trying to beat AI rivals Anthropic and OpenAI to the public markets as early as this summer. To appreciate how dramatic this shift has been, consider that just nine months ago SpaceX investors were buying shares at a valuation of about $400 billion. That figure sounded a bit rich, and made SpaceX the most valuable privately held US company. It’s done fine since then, though it hasn’t changed much. Starlink, its satellite internet service provider, seems to be growing—and SpaceX’s revenue is “approaching $20 billion,” according to Bloomberg Intelligence, up from about $16 billion last year. Although the company’s in-development Starship rocket had two successful test flights in the second half of last year, it has yet to reach low Earth orbit.

And the questions that hung over the business last summer remain unsettled. Starlink is a smallish internet provider at the moment, with about 10 million subscribers, and it’s not clear it will ever be able to deliver enough bandwidth to profitably support the hundreds of millions of subscribers Musk would need to justify a multitrillion-dollar valuation. (Currently, T-Mobile US Inc. has about 14 times as many subscribers and a valuation that’s a fraction of SpaceX’s.) The service faces stiff competition in countries with established providers. In the developing world some customers have complained that its prices are too high.

The other significant source of revenue for SpaceX comes from the US government, a relationship that carries significant political risks. Musk’s relationship with President Donald Trump has been, well, a bit choppy. His ties to the Democratic Party, which seems likely to retake at least one chamber of Congress in November, have been broken since he was famously snubbed at a White House event in 2022.

Bloomberg Businessweek Senior Reporter, Max Chafkin, joins Paul Sweeney on “Bloomberg Intelligence” to discuss the historic IPO and when the launch is expected.

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