SpaceX files to go public

SpaceX, Elon Musk’s rocket and satellite maker, filed confidentially on Wednesday for an initial public offering, according to two people familiar with the company, setting the stage for what could be one of the largest offerings ever.

The company is committed to debuting in June, and Mr. Musk is aiming to raise $50 billion to $75 billion from going public, said one of the people, who was not authorized to speak publicly on confidential discussions.

SpaceX values itself at more than $1 trillion and would be one of the most valuable companies to reach the stock market, after Saudi Aramco’s 2019 debut valued the energy giant at $1.7 trillion. Aramco ultimately raised more than $29 billion from its offering.

A SpaceX offering could signal a wave of enormous I.P.O.s, with the artificial intelligence companies OpenAI and Anthropic also exploring the possibility of going public. SpaceX’s offering would be a generational moneymaking event for Wall Street, the company’s employees and, of course, Mr. Musk, who is already one of the world’s richest men and could become the first trillionaire.

Mr. Musk, 54, who also runs the electric carmaker Tesla and other companies, did not respond to a request for comment. A SpaceX spokesman did not respond to a request for comment. Bloomberg earlier reported the filing.

SpaceX, which Mr. Musk founded in 2002 with the goal of sending people to Mars, has grown into one of the world’s leading space companies. From the beginning, Mr. Musk has said SpaceX’s ultimate mission is to make humans a multiplanetary species, ensuring that life would thrive if something happened to Earth.

Since then, SpaceX has launched rockets into space and established a popular satellite internet service, Starlink. The company’s customers include the federal government, the Ukrainian military and many others. In the United States, SpaceX accounts for five of every six launches into space, according to Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology.

In February, Mr. Musk merged SpaceX with xAI, his A.I. company. The SpaceX umbrella now encompasses Starship, a self-landing rocket meant for Mars; Starlink; Grok, xAI’s chatbot; and X, the social network formerly known as Twitter.

Money raised from a public offering would most likely help SpaceX finance its long-term goals of launching artificial intelligence data centers into orbit, creating a colony on the moon and getting humans to Mars. These are expensive and unproven endeavors that may take years and billions of dollars to achieve.

SpaceX has also discussed using some of the money raised from an I.P.O. to fund xAI and its working capital, one of the people said, as well as to buy up and expunge the billions of dollars in debt that Twitter borrowed when Mr. Musk bought the social media company in 2022. Bankers have pushed SpaceX to hold at least $15 billion to $20 billion in cash, the person said.

A confidential filing means that the financials of the company are not disclosed until later. In June, Mr. Musk posted on social media that he expected SpaceX’s revenue to reach $15.5 billion in 2025, with about $1.1 billion of that coming from NASA. Total revenue would be up from $7.4 billion in 2023, according to documents obtained by The New York Times. Starlink alone generated $8 billion in sales in 2024, according to the documents.

A public offering would be a major boon for SpaceX’s executives, employees and investors, some of whom took a risk in supporting Mr. Musk’s goals and have waited for more than two decades to cash in on their shares.

Mr. Musk also stands to benefit. Much of his $823 billion net worth, according to Forbes, is from his stake in the rocket company, which stood at around 44 percent in 2022. If SpaceX’s valuation increases in public trading, he could become the world’s first person with a 13-figure net worth.

SpaceX’s main underwriters — which are expected to include Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America — are likely to generate fees in the hundreds of millions of dollars collectively.

Mr. Musk has shown a distrust of public markets in the past. In 2018, he posted on social media that he had arranged the funding to take Tesla private, even when he hadn’t. When he bought Twitter, he also took it private.

An I.P.O. would require Mr. Musk to disclose more information about SpaceX to investors and push him to fulfill his promises about the company. Over the years, he has been overly optimistic on how long it would take to get his rockets to Mars. He has set a similarly hopeful timeline of getting data centers into space, which is currently an unproven concept.

In a recent memo to employees, Mr. Musk said orbital data centers would be the cheapest way to satisfy A.I. computational needs “within two to three years.” He has also talked up a theory of “sustainable abundance,” in which his companies, working with one another, will create A.I. and robot products that help end poverty and strife, while making human work obsolete.

Ross Gerber, an investment manager whose firm invested in Twitter and is now a SpaceX shareholder, said it was a terrible time to go public, citing wars and unpredictable economic conditions. But Mr. Musk needs cash to fund expensive projects, including data centers in space and a chip manufacturing plant, and to cover two money “losers” in X and xAI, Mr. Gerber said.

“Elon is saying, ‘I have this window to fund all this craziness for a good period of time based on the SpaceX hype,’” Mr. Gerber said. “By merging the two losers with one winner, he keeps all the balls in the air. He keeps everything afloat.”

Brett Winton, who is the chief futurist at Ark Invest, an investment management firm that is a SpaceX investor, was more sanguine about the company’s prospects. Last year, Ark Invest predicted that SpaceX’s value would reach $2.5 trillion by 2030. Mr. Winton said the scale of the I.P.O. was a testament to what SpaceX could achieve.

“The amount is commensurate with the size of the opportunity,” he said.