Context

I remember seeing the notification on my phone when Oracle stock rose in September of 2025, making Larry Ellison the richest person in the world, right over Elon Musk. At that very moment, I thought something to myself: what would Elon do to satiate his ego and regain that number one spot?

And here we are, almost 10 months later, and SpaceX has released its stock offering to the public at an almost absurd valuation of $1.77 trillion. I'm not saying these two events are correlated, correlation doesn't equal causation, but this is simply a restatement of what happened.

As someone who's passionate about finance and its ability to help individuals and societies, this valuation just doesn't make any sense, especially coming from top institutions.

What is an IPO?

An IPO stands for Initial Public Offering, it's when a private company sells public shares for the first time. This is what marks the transition of a private company to a public one.

Companies, whether in their startup phase or years in the making, typically decide to go public to raise capital, pay off debts, fund growth, and for marketing. IPOs also allow company insiders to diversify their holdings or create liquidity, selling all or a portion of their shares as part of the IPO.

Data on the SpaceX IPO

The starting price was $135 per share. Meaning one share, a piece of ownership, was worth $135. SpaceX sold about 555.6 million shares, bringing in $75 billion for the company, making it one of the largest public offerings in the entire history of the U.S. stock market.

This places the entire company at a value of $1.77 trillion. This value is called the market capitalization, and it represents the overall consensus of what the stock market believes the company is worth.

And here's the part sparking debate over whether this valuation is correct: the fundamentals that SpaceX has are unprofitable and don't justify its $1.77 trillion valuation.

As of 2025, SpaceX has lost $4.9 billion on over $18 billion in revenue. While the company has grown since 2024, when it generated $14 billion in revenue, SpaceX has lost over $37 billion cumulatively since inception. SpaceX has spent far more money than it's earned. But this doesn't mean the company isn't growing, it's just pouring cash into research and development for future projects.

Continuing to build uncertainty among investors, SpaceX's business structure looks like it could be three businesses. This isn't necessarily a bad thing when looked at from a vertical integration perspective; it just makes pricing in the future hard, especially considering the success rate of the company's management with Elon's countless other endeavors.

But I digress. The data around SpaceX is publicly available online (specifically the SEC's EDGAR) for your own interpretation. Just remember that intelligent investors don't invest in speculative matters — or at least, when they do, they keep it small.