According to sources collected by Bloomberg, SpaceX would have confidentially filed its IPO project with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission for an IPO which could take place as early as June. The operation could reach 75 billion dollars (around 64 billion euros), for a target valuation greater than 1,750 billion dollars (nearly 1,487 billion euros).
On this scale, SpaceX is not content with aiming for the largest IPO in history, ahead of Saudi Aramco in 2019. It imposes a new grammar, which should be looked at in more perspective.
Over the past decade, the IPOs of large technology companies have gradually shifted the balance between capital and power. Alphabet and Meta have set a precedent, that of open capital, but locked governance via structures with differentiated voting rights. Small shareholders have little say in the matter. But these companies remained, fundamentally, platforms.
A second shift occurred with IPOs like that of Airbnb or Uber, where the issue was no longer just growth, but the domination of user infrastructures on a global scale, whether in mobility, tourism, or work. Here again, the capital raised served to consolidate positions already acquired, rather than to redistribute power.
With SpaceX, the movement crosses an additional threshold, we are no longer talking about intermediation or platforms, but about physical and strategic infrastructures: access to space, global communication network, tomorrow computing capacity and on-board intelligence. Where Saudi Aramco embodied the marketing of a sovereign state resource, SpaceX represents the IPO of a sovereign infrastructure… in the hands of the private sector, and in this case Elon Musk.
This change of scale reflects an evolution in the very role of financial markets, which is no longer to arbitrate the value of competing companies, but to finance assets which have become almost systemic, without however modifying their governance.
From this perspective, the upcoming IPOs of OpenAI or Anthropic could follow the same logic. Not as isolated events, but as different expressions of the same model: capturing capital raised on the markets, to finance critical infrastructures (computing, models, networks) while maintaining tight control in the hands of a few actors.
What SpaceX formalizes today is therefore not only an extraordinary financial operation, it is the culmination of a capitalism where access to the market no longer means sharing power, but amplification of an already established control.
SpaceX would consider reserving up to 30% of the offer for individual investors, promising them to participate in an extraordinary industrial adventure. With nearly $20 billion in revenue expected in 2026, the company is based on a solid industrial base, structured around its launchers and Starlink.
The structuring of the banking union would revolve around Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley or Citigroupwhich would include European and Asian players, from Deutsche Bank à UBSpassing through Mizuho Financial Group. This global deployment is not that of a simple market operation. It corresponds to the putting into circulation of an asset perceived as structuring on a global scale.
This is precisely where the shift is located. SpaceX today concentrates functions that historically fell under the jurisdiction of States: access to space, the capacity to deploy communication infrastructures, and uses with a strong strategic dimension. With Starlink, it operates a network independent of national sovereignties. With its launchers, it controls access to orbit. And with xAI, it is part of the battle for the mastery of intelligent systems.
Behind the financial operation lies a more structuring question: that of the allocation of capital towards actors who equip themselves with quasi-sovereign infrastructures while locking in governance. SpaceX is an advanced illustration of this: too strategic to fail, but structured not to be controlled. Its entry into the stock market does not just reveal this tension, it poses a broader challenge: that of financing, via the markets, critical capacities without sharing control. The subject is no longer just economic, it becomes political.
