SpaceX filed for the biggest IPO ever. The S-1 says Starlink is the only part that makes money.
SpaceX is targeting a ~$1.75 trillion June listing under SPCX — the largest IPO in history. The filing tells a sharper story: Starlink is the cash engine, the rest burns billions, and Musk keeps 85% of the votes.
SpaceX filed its S-1 on May 20, setting up what would be the largest IPO in history: a Nasdaq listing under the ticker SPCX, targeted for June 12, raising up to $75 billion at roughly a $1.75 trillion valuation (some reports say the target is creeping toward $2T). At that price it's valued at about 110 times trailing revenue. The filing is a fascinating document — because it quietly says one thing the headline doesn't: only one part of SpaceX actually makes money.
What the S-1 shows
SpaceX did $18.7 billion in revenue in 2025. Starlink was $11.4 billion of it — 61% of the company — up 48% year over year, with $4.4 billion in operating profit and more than 10 million customers across 160-plus markets by February. That's not a side project; that's the business.
The rest of the picture is heavier. SpaceX posted a GAAP net loss of about $4.9 billion in 2025, and another $4.28 billion loss in Q1 2026 (on $4.69B of revenue), weighed down by capex, stock comp, debt, and AI losses folded in from the X/xAI side of Musk's empire. So you have one profit engine (Starlink), one capital-intensive near-monopoly (launch), and an expensive AI bet — bundled into a single trillion-dollar ticker.
And the governance: Musk keeps roughly 85% of the voting power through Class B shares while owning about 42% of the equity, and his proposed pay package is one billion performance shares tied to establishing a permanent one-million-person colony on Mars. That is not a sentence that appears in a normal prospectus.
Our read
This is the purest "buy the founder" trade ever taken public.
The bull case is genuinely strong, and it's spelled Starlink: a profitable, fast-growing cash machine with 10 million subscribers and a widening operating margin, attached to a launch business with no real competitor. If you squint, Starlink alone can carry a very large valuation.
The catch is everything wrapped around it. At ~110× revenue with a $4.9B loss, the multiple isn't priced on fundamentals — it's priced on Starlink's trajectory plus Mars optionality plus Musk. Public investors get the AI losses (xAI's burn now rides along), almost no voting say (85% sits with Musk), and a comp plan that pays out on a Martian city. You are not buying a company so much as buying a seat on Elon Musk's conviction.
That fits the year. 2026 is when the private giants cash in — OpenAI filed for its own ~$1T listing, Anthropic just posted its first profit, and the AI-infrastructure money keeps compounding. SpaceX is the biggest of the bunch and the strangest: the others are selling growth stories; SpaceX is selling a profitable utility (Starlink) stapled to two moonshots and a control structure that asks you to trust one person completely.
Watch the split the market assigns. If SPCX holds its valuation, it means investors are paying trillions for the bundle and the founder. If it wobbles, it'll be because someone did the math on the part that loses $4.9 billion a year — and noticed they don't get a vote on any of it. Either way, the S-1 already told you where the money is. It's the dish on your roof, not the rocket on the pad.
