Elon Musk’s SpaceX plans April investor briefings for what could be world’s biggest-ever IPO

NEW YORK – SpaceX is telling prospective IPO investors to expect briefings in April from company executives, according to people familiar with the matter, as advisers scramble to file for potentially the biggest listing of all time.

Billionaire Elon Musk’s space and artificial intelligence company is set to hold so-called testing-the-waters investor meetings in the weeks after the Easter holiday, the people said. The company is set to file confidentially as soon as this week for an initial public offering that could raise as much as US$75 billion (S$96.5 billion), Bloomberg News has reported.

Though SpaceX has been discussing the prospective listing with investors in less formal meetings, the next briefings would potentially include more detail that would support its valuation target, one of the people said. The company could seek a value of more than US$1.75 trillion in the IPO, which is targeted for June, people familiar with the matter have said.

Potential investors are eagerly awaiting more details on how the firm is pitching its valuation, particularly after it acquired Mr Musk’s xAI. His bold vision to put AI data centres in space and a base on the moon would require huge investment and technological breakthroughs, and the outlook for the third-generation version of the Starship rocket is also a key factor in whether the company can win over backers.

SpaceX’s rocket launch programme and Starlink satellites generate the majority of revenue, approaching US$20 billion in 2026, with xAI likely to generate less than US$1 billion, according to Bloomberg Intelligence. The AI start-up turned SpaceX subsidiary has roughly US$17.5 billion of debt, which is set to be paid back in full, sources have said.

At a US$1.75 trillion market value, SpaceX would be bigger than all but five of the companies in the S&P 500 Index – Nvidia, Apple, Alphabet, Microsoft and Amazon. It would be larger by that metric than Meta Platforms and Mr Musk’s own Tesla, the two other members of the so-called Magnificent 7 stocks that together account for more than one-third of the index’s market value.

A PitchBook analyst called that valuation justifiable, while noting that it would mean a price-to-sales ratio of about 110 times on a trailing basis. That compares with Palantir Technologies’ lofty price-to-sales ratio of roughly 79 times.

The listing itself would be a record-breaking event if it even approaches US$75 billion. That would be more than double the size of the largest-ever IPO, Saudi Aramco’s US$29 billion listing in 2019.

The IPO is expected to have a sizeable retail component. SpaceX could allocate as much as 30 per cent of the offering to retail investors, a person familiar with the matter said.

A group of Wall Street giants are being positioned to lead work on the IPO. Bank of America, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase & Co and Morgan Stanley have all been lined up for the senior roles on the IPO, people with knowledge of the details have said.

Deliberations are ongoing and details including the timing of the meetings and the confidential filing could change. BLOOMBERG