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Elon Musk’s SpaceX has confidentially filed for a U.S. IPO. If it lists at the rumoured valuation, it will be the biggest public offering in the history of financial markets. Bigger than Alibaba. Bigger than Saudi Aramco. The number being thrown around is $1.75 trillion.
At that valuation, SpaceX would immediately become the sixth most valuable publicly listed company in the United States, worth more than Meta Platforms, a company that has been public for over a decade, and Berkshire Hathaway, a company older than Elon Musk himself.
There seems to be no shortage of hype. But behind the headline, there are three stories happening simultaneously: a genuinely extraordinary business, a valuation that stretches every traditional yardstick, and a structural risk to retail investors that almost nobody is talking about. Let us take them in order.
The business: it is really a Starlink IPO
When analysts talk about SpaceX, they are mostly talking about Starlink, its satellite internet service. And for good reason. Starlink is not just SpaceX’s biggest business. It may be the reason any of this valuation math is even remotely defensible.
Here is how it works. Instead of relying on ground-based fibre or cell towers, Starlink beams high-speed internet from a constellation of satellites in low earth orbit, just 340 to 750 miles above the surface. Because they orbit so much closer than traditional geostationary satellites, which sit at 22,000 miles up, latency drops to around 25 milliseconds, comparable to many wired broadband connections.
The scale appears staggering. SpaceX currently operates over 9,600 satellites, about two thirds of all active payload satellites on the planet. It adds roughly 70 new satellites every single week. It has built and launched more active satellites than every other space program and company combined. SpaceX’s CFO Bret Johnsen told IPO bankers the addressable market for Starlink alone is $1.6 trillion, and the total space business opportunity is $370 billion.
Starlink generated an estimated $10.6 billion in revenue in 2025, roughly 67% of SpaceX’s total, with EBITDA margins of around 54%. That would be closer to a software company than an aerospace one. Once the satellites are in orbit, every new subscriber is almost pure margin. The subscriber base doubled for two consecutive years, with 4.6 million added in 2025 alone. Amazon’s competing LEO service has only a handful of satellites in orbit. There is nobody else doing it at this scale.
Beyond residential broadband, Starlink has expanded into maritime and aviation connectivity, a government-focused line called Starshield for national security use cases, and a direct-to-cell service that lets unmodified mobile phones connect via satellite. That last product already has over 6 million monthly subscribers before a full commercial rollout, through a partnership with T-Mobile. Starlink recently also struck a deal with prepaid carrier US Mobile to offer bundles as low as $47 a month, a sign of just how aggressively it seems to be chasing mainstream consumer adoption.
As PitchBook put it, a SpaceX IPO would be, in substance, almost a Starlink IPO.
The numbers: two very different stories
Here is where it gets complicated. Depending on which report you read, SpaceX either made $8 billion in profit last year or lost $5 billion. Both are technically true. Understanding why tells you something important about what you are actually buying.
Reuters reported in January that SpaceX posted about $8 billion in EBITDA on revenues of $15 to $16 billion in 2025. The Falcon 9 completed 165 launches that year, a new annual record. The core business is genuinely profitable and growing fast.
But in February 2025, SpaceX acquired Elon Musk’s AI startup xAI in a deal that valued xAI at $250 billion and SpaceX at $1 trillion. xAI, which makes the Grok chatbot, is money-losing. When folded into the consolidated accounts, The Information reported that total losses hit nearly $5 billion on revenues of $18.5 billion.
So the core SpaceX business earned around $6 to $8 billion in EBITDA. The consolidated entity, including xAI, reported a $5 billion net loss. At $1.75 trillion, you are paying a premium for both the proven business and a money-losing AI bet packaged together.
SpaceX is also planning to deploy AI data centres in orbit, linked to xAI, and has ambitious plans for the Starship rocket programme for Moon and Mars missions. None of these appear to be proven yet. Investors are paying today for what these might become.
The valuation: how do you even price this?
SpaceX has almost no comparable public peer. So Wall Street may be reaching for unusual yardsticks. At least one large institutional investor is privately benchmarking SpaceX not against Boeing or AT&T, but against Palantir Technologies and AI infrastructure plays like GE Vernova and Vertiv.
The logic is that legacy telecom and aerospace comparisons miss the point. What matters is whether SpaceX can capture the economics of a long-term secular shift, the way AI infrastructure companies have. But even those preferred comparables do not look much like SpaceX. Palantir trades at 43 times revenue and 75 times earnings. GE Vernova at around 4 times revenue. Vertiv at about 6 times. SpaceX at $1.75 trillion would trade at 110 times its 2025 revenue estimates.
NYU’s Aswath Damodaran, one of the world’s leading valuation experts, was blunt about it: investors have already decided SpaceX is a great buy and are now working backwards to justify the price. “They’re hoping there’s enough mood and momentum behind SpaceX, and when it goes public, the mood and momentum will take the stock up,” he said.
To be fair, there is a real case. SpaceX launches a rocket nearly every two days, faster than any space program or company in history. Its cost advantage in launch is so significant that it creates a bottleneck for rivals. Amazon cannot replenish its own satellite constellation fast enough without SpaceX’s help. That is a durable moat. PitchBook described it as “infrastructure-monopoly economics.” The question is whether you should pay 110 times revenue for it today.
The hidden risk: the detail buried at the bottom of every article
Now for the part that deserves far more attention than it seems to be getting.
SpaceX is reportedly considering allowing some existing shareholders to sell their stakes on the very first day of trading, doing away with the standard 180-day lock-up period that typically prevents insiders from cashing out immediately after an IPO.
This sounds like a procedural footnote. It is not.
Section 11 of the Securities Act of 1933 is the strongest legal protection available to retail investors at an IPO. It imposes strict liability on issuers for material misstatements in a registration document. You do not need to prove the company intended to mislead you. You just need to prove you bought shares tied to that registration statement. William O. Douglas, the longest-serving Supreme Court justice and third SEC chair, called it the statute’s “in terrorem” provision. Companies are terrified of it, and that terror would be that protection.
But after the Supreme Court’s unanimous ruling in Slack vs. Pirani in 2023, investors must prove their shares are “traceable” to the registration statement to bring a Section 11 claim. When a lock-up is in place, only registered shares trade in the early months after an IPO, so tracing is simple. When there is no lock-up, registered and unregistered insider shares mix in the market from day one. Tracing becomes practically impossible. And with it, Section 11 protection effectively disappears, even if the registration statement was misleading.
This is not an accident. As prominent securities lawyer Boris Feldman wrote in the Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance, underwriters would be “well-advised to think about easing lock-up requirements in order to enhance the potency of the standing defense to Section 11 claims.” In plain English: weaken the lock-up, and you weaken investors’ ability to sue.
Retail investors flooding into SpaceX on day one, paying the highest premium with the most excitement, would have the weakest legal safety net. They would have no idea this protection had been stripped away.
A rulemaking petition filed with the SEC in March 2023 documented how underwriter discretion to waive lock-ups had gone from practically nonexistent before 2010 to appearing in the vast majority of IPO filings by 2022. The SEC’s own Investor Advisory Committee held a panel on the issue in September 2024 and formally recommended a fix in March 2025: a short mandatory post-IPO lock-up during which only registered shares can trade. The proposed fix would simply restore what Rule 144 originally did when the SEC adopted it in 1972, before it was quietly amended away.
The SEC has done nothing. The largest IPO in history may be the one that launches without the most important investor protection in securities law.
How to invest via Vested
If you’re in India, you currently can’t participate in U.S. IPOs like SpaceX. There’s no platform, including Vested, that has access to IPO allocations. Regulatory constraints and the lack of reliable partners for routes like SPVs make this practically impossible today.
What you can do is invest once the company lists. As soon as the stock starts trading in the secondary market, you can buy it through platforms like Vested under the Liberalised Remittance Scheme (LRS), which allows up to $250,000 per year.
So while IPO access isn’t on the table, you’re not locked out entirely. You just enter a little later, once the market opens it up.
On taxes: gains on U.S. stocks are taxed in India. Short-term gains, on holdings under 24 months, are taxed at your income slab rate. Long-term gains above Rs 1.25 lakh attract 12.5% tax. Dividends are taxed at your slab rate, and the U.S. withholds 25% on dividends, which you can claim as a credit under the India-U.S. DTAA. Speak to a tax advisor before committing significant capital.
The bottom line
SpaceX is a once-in-a-generation kind of company. The Starlink model is genuinely elegant: a vertically integrated stack from rocket manufacturing to satellite deployment to consumer hardware, with margins that look more like software than aerospace. No competitor is anywhere close to doing what it does at this scale.
But the IPO asks you to pay 110 times revenue for all of that, plus a money-losing AI acquisition, plus unproven bets on Starship, orbital data centres, and direct-to-cell dominance. That is a lot of optionality baked into today’s price.
And if the lock-up is waived, the investors best positioned to know whether the prospectus is accurate are the ones selling to you on day one.
The largest IPO in history may also be the one that teaches retail investors the hardest lesson about reading footnotes.
This is not investment advice. Please consult a qualified financial advisor before making any investment decisions.
