SpaceX files confidentially for IPO in mega listing potentially valued at $1.75 trillion, report says

SpaceX, the technology conglomerate founded by Elon Musk, reportedly filed disclosures confidentially with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission ahead of an initial public offering. SpaceX could seek a valuation of $1.75 trillion, according to Bloomberg, which cited anonymous sources.

Under SEC rules, a private company can file its IPO registration statement confidentially 15 days before it begins marketing its shares to public investors, allowing it to receive feedback from the agency in private. The company has also lined up an unusually large number of 21 banks to manage the mega IPO, internally codenamed “Project Apex,” Reuters reported Tuesday.

The company expects to raise $75 billion, which would make it the largest IPO in history, far beyond oil giant Saudi Aramco’s $29 billion listing in 2019. SpaceX has raised an estimated $10 billion as a private company.

Founded in 2002, SpaceX is the world’s leading space company, flying a fleet of reusable rockets and spacecraft, and operating a 10,000-satellite communications network, Starlink. Musk brought Silicon Valley culture to the staid world of space contracting and disrupted the sector, creating a new industry for private technology and a boom in space startups.

In February, SpaceX acquired Musk’s xAI in a deal that valued the entity at $1.25 trillion. The conglomerate now includes xAI, Musk’s frontier generative AI lab, and X, the social network formerly known as Twitter.

Musk said for years that SpaceX would not go public until its spacecraft had reached Mars, but a voracious demand for capital has changed that equation, even as the company has reset its ambitions to aim for the moon. In recent months, Musk has said the company will build a network of as many as a million data center satellites in space, built and launched from Earth’s nearest neighbor.

SpaceX needs billions to build Starship, the fully reusable heavy-lift rocket that is central to its future business plans and NASA’s hope of beating China to the moon; to purchase spectrum and replenish its Starlink satellites as they become obsolete; and to pay for the compute required to build and operate xAI’s deep learning models.