According to Fortune, a potential SpaceX IPO could be the largest public offering of all time, surpassing Saudi Aramco’s $29 billion listing. Analysts peg the company’s potential market cap at a staggering $1.5 trillion, which would instantly rank it among the world’s top 10 most valuable public companies. The company is forecast to generate about $15 billion in revenue this year, growing to $22-$24 billion by 2026, and has been cash-flow positive for years. This comes as a reported tender offer could soon double SpaceX’s private valuation to $800 billion. But the move would force Elon Musk to open his prized, privately-held space company to the intense scrutiny and regulatory burdens of public markets, something he has historically avoided for all his companies except Tesla.
The Musk Paradox
Here’s the thing: this seems completely against Musk’s nature. He took Twitter private to avoid scrutiny. He’s kept Neuralink, xAI, and The Boring Company private. And his one public company, Tesla, has been a masterclass in Wall Street drama—constant short sellers, investigated tweets, ridiculed timelines, and shareholder lawsuits over his pay. He’s even called massive short positions “hurtful.” So why would he ever subject SpaceX, the core of his Martian dreams, to that? The obvious answer is he probably doesn’t want to. But the math might eventually force his hand.
Hitting the Private Market Ceiling
SpaceX has already raised over $10 billion privately, a huge sum. But its ambitions are on another scale entirely. Think about it: building a city on Mars, launching tens of thousands more Starlink satellites, constructing space-based data centers. As PitchBook analyst Ali Javaheri told Fortune, “SpaceX has effectively hit the ceiling of what private markets can support.” There’s maybe $2-3 trillion available for private companies. But the global public equity markets? That’s over $100 trillion. A public offering could raise more than $30 billion in one shot—triple all the capital SpaceX has raised in its entire history. That kind of money funds multi-decade, industrial-scale roadmaps. Private funds just aren’t built for that.
The Inevitable Headaches
If SpaceX goes public, the headaches start immediately. Look at the board. Of the six current members, most are insiders or Musk loyalists: PayPal co-founders, longtime friends like Steve Jurvetson, COO Gwynne Shotwell, and investor Antonio Gracias—whose ties to Musk were central in the lawsuit over Musk’s Tesla pay package. As Javaheri notes, it’s “heavily weighted toward insiders.” A public company board needs truly independent directors, and you can bet investors will demand a shake-up. Then there’s the ongoing litigation, like the NLRB case over fired engineers, that would need detailed disclosure. Every Starship explosion, every delay, every ambitious tweet would move the stock and attract analyst fury. Musk would hate it.
So, Will It Happen?
The CFO has called the IPO “highly uncertain.” SpaceX is profitable, so it doesn’t need cash to keep the lights on. But it does need staggering capital to build the future Musk tweets about. The pressure might not be from early investors wanting to cash out—SpaceX handles that with regular tender offers. The pressure is from the physics of funding interplanetary colonization. Basically, when your project list includes “Starlink factories on the moon,” you eventually run out of private billionaires. The IPO might be the only way to pay for the dream. But for Musk, it would mean trading a piece of his control for the capital to execute his vision. That’s a brutal trade-off, even for the guy who wants to retire on Mars.
