The SpaceX IPO is great for Elon Musk and terrible for you

I haven’t seen anything as stupid as the WeWork IPO document in a very long time — that is, until Elon Musk filed to take SpaceX public. WeWork was a joke. SpaceX is a threat. And if Musk and his bankers have their way, you are going to be their bagholder.

The SpaceX IPO is great for Elon Musk and terrible for you

The biggest public offering ever is financial nihilism’s final form.

The SpaceX IPO is great for Elon Musk and terrible for you

The biggest public offering ever is financial nihilism’s final form.

Lots of the top-line details leaked long before the S-1 filing itself became public. There’s the rumored valuation of more than $1 trillion. That’s despite the nearly $5 billion in losses last year. The total addressable market (TAM) for SpaceX — the amount of revenue SpaceX thinks it could make if won over what it thinks is its entire customer base — was listed as $28.5 trillion. By way of comparison, the gross domestic product of the US as a whole was a hair over $24 trillion, according to the St. Louis Fed.

I guess I could believe that Musk is the Lord and Savior of a bunch of weird polygons

This is absurd nonsense, but it might not matter. Musk is the original financial influencer, and his struggling electric car company, Tesla, trades at more than 300 times earnings. Ford and Toyota both trade at about 11 times earnings. Even Nvidia, a company that is arguably printing money, trades at 33 times earnings. Tesla is a meme stock, and SpaceX is poised to be the next one. Never mind that it is basically a space company plus an AI company plus a social network — a meme stock doesn’t have to make sense.

So where do I start? I guess we’re all supposed to pretend it’s 2015 and that Musk cares about humanity, and especially about sending humanity to space. Musk is trying to sell a big company with a big story: his messianic mission to “extend the light of consciousness to the stars,” a phrase that occurs seven times in the S-1. (“Light of consciousness” without its astral accompaniment occurs an additional three times.) There is an artist’s illustration of “Life on Mars.” The people who live there appear to be composed of polygons. I guess I could believe that Musk is the Lord and Savior of a bunch of weird polygons; I’ve seen the Cybertruck.

(WeWork guru Rebekah Neumann must be eating her heart out right now — “the power of We” is so quaint by comparison.)

Musk knows that his strength is the cult of losers who worship him. That’s why 30 percent of the IPO is reserved for retail investors. As for the grown-ups, well, there’s a Keynesian beauty contest in play; if you know that the loser cultists will buy whatever he’s selling, and that Nasdaq rule changes may get it fast-tracked onto the index, it might make sense to buy into the IPO. You’ll be watching Number Go Up regardless of the underlying value, and you’d be an idiot to leave that on the table. And the more people think that way, the more Number Go Up. Say it with me now, my Keynesians: The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent.

In some ways, this isn’t just SpaceX’s IPO. It’s the IPO of financial nihilism writ large. Robinhood profited off financial nihilism, but it wasn’t itself a meme stock. SpaceX is different. It’s worse. And I don’t know how normal people can avoid having it stuffed down their throats.

SpaceX: An AI company

This company is called SpaceX, and it’s known for building rockets. The filing is peppered with references to the Moon (74), Mars (63) and “and beyond” (13), as in “Earth’s orbit and beyond” or “the Moon, Mars, and beyond.” But looking at the numbers from its IPO document, this is, by SpaceX’s own admission, an AI company. $26.5 trillion of its $28.5 trillion TAM is AI applications. If that seems awfully optimistic to you, don’t worry: SpaceX excluded the Russian and Chinese markets from its estimates.

About $13 billion, or roughly two-thirds, of SpaceX’s capital spending in 2025 went to AI buildout. How did that go? Well, the AI arm of SpaceX lost $6 billion in operations and had revenue of just $3.2 billion. Meanwhile, Anthropic is going to be turning an operating profit of $559 million in the second quarter of this year. Yeah, you read that right: *Profit. *In the quarter.

Is Grok one of the most advanced frontier models? Well, it’s distilled from them, anyway!

Of course, you could figure the vibes on that out just by knowing that SpaceX leased out its massive cloud computing operation to Anthropic for what the S-1 reveals to be $15 billion a year. Incidentally, xAI’s government contracts aren’t going so hot, which is possibly a problem for the company’s planned IPO.

So let’s talk about Grok, which Verge readers may also know as MechaHitler, “a truth-seeking AI model ... which has emerged as one of the world’s most advanced frontier models,” according to the S-1. This is quite a turnaround from Musk saying in March that “xAI was not built right first time around, so is being rebuilt from the foundations up.” Is it one of the most advanced frontier models? Well, it’s distilled from them, anyway!

The details on xAI’s recent deal with Cursor make this look even worse. You may recall that in April, SpaceX announced it made a commitment to maybe buy the AI coding company, which would give SpaceX a way to compete with enterprise AI products made by Anthropic and OpenAI. Well, if the deal goes through, existing shareholders will be diluted to the tune of $60 billion. If it does not go through, SpaceX pays Cursor $1.5 billion and also lets Cursor use more than $8 billion of compute. This does not suggest a strong negotiating position for SpaceX.

Greg Brockman and Ilya Sutskever, two OpenAI cofounders, felt in 2018 that Musk “really hasn’t done his homework [on] AI / AGI.”

The filing notes all the places SpaceX is now under investigation for Grok’s production of nonconsensual sexualized images, including those of children. Three lawsuits are called out specifically in the filing, two of which are attempting to achieve class-action status.

The timing of this filing is a little bit funny. Just last week, Musk lost his suit against Sam Altman and OpenAI, which accomplished basically nothing except revealing how bad Musk is at AI. Greg Brockman and Ilya Sutskever, two OpenAI cofounders, felt in 2018 that Musk “really hasn’t done his homework [on] AI / AGI.” That appears to still be true today.

SpaceX said that the AI unit containing X and xAI generated only $818 million in revenue in the first quarter of 2026. By way of comparison, Twitter alone made $1.2 billion in the first quarter of 2022, or about 30 percent more,* before *Musk bought it. A remarkable business mind, truly.

Rocket to the crypt

Doubtless you are thinking, well, but what about space? There’s plenty of AI bullshit there, and we’ll get to it later, but in this case it all hinges on Starship, which has so far been prone to unexpected explosions. Starship is clutch for launching the heavier versions of Starlink satellites, some of which are currently sitting around gathering dust as they wait for their rides into orbit. Some NASA (and other) government contracts hinge on it, too.

When the filing dropped, the Starship prototypes launched had barely carried more than the Falcon 9, the lowest-end rocket SpaceX has. You may be thinking that’s the kind of thing that would be disclosed in an IPO filing, but you’d be mistaken. “Starship V3 is designed to deliver 100 metric tons to space in a fully reusable configuration while enabling rapid turnaround times.” I am going to skip “fully reusable” except to point out that it will limit capacity if it is even achievable.

Instead of disclosure about what SpaceX had actually achieved to date with Starship, the language we see is this: “We expect to commence deploying our next-generation V3 satellites, designed to offer one Tbps of downlink capacity per satellite, using Starship in the second half of 2026. W