A SpaceX IPO could be the largest public offering of all time—and Elon Musk’s biggest headache

Since reports of the potential IPO emerged, would-be buyers have been acting like Christmas came early. Investors—from Wall Street mainstay institutions to the Elon fanboys who trade Shiba Inu meme coins in their basements—will clamor to purchase shares in SpaceX on the public markets. The company, which Musk founded in 2002 with a large portion of the money he had made off PayPal, has quite literally built the foundation of America’s private space ecosystem. It is the leading space company in the world and is one of the U.S. government’s most important—and well-paid—private contractors.

Reporting has, thus far, pegged a potential market capitalization at $1.5 trillion, meaning that a public debut would immediately catapult SpaceX into the ranks of the 10 most valuable public companies in the world. Payload Space, which publishes detailed annual revenue research and estimates on SpaceX, forecasted that SpaceX will generate around $15 billion in revenue this year, and between $22 billion to $24 billion in 2026. Musk said earlier this month that SpaceX has been cash flow positive for “many” years. “The SpaceX IPO will be the most anticipated and successful IPO ever, in my opinion,” says Andrew Rocco, a stock strategist at Zacks Investment Research.

Early shareholders who have had to wait for their turn to sell shares in SpaceX’s liquidity events will finally get all the liquidity their hearts desire. And journalists like myself will finally have real visibility into the company’s business and profit breakdowns, and an explanation of what SpaceX has determined are key risks to the business. 

In short, pretty much everyone has a legitimate reason to get excited about a SpaceX IPO—except for Elon Musk.

It’s hard at first to grasp why Musk has suddenly become convinced that taking SpaceX public is worth the scrutiny, criticism, and regulatory burden he has long said he wanted to avoid. He was the leader who took Twitter private, after all, so he could instill sweeping layoffs and changes without the criticisms of the public markets. And, in earlier business history lore, he famously tweeted he was considering taking Tesla private in 2018—a tweet that prompted an SEC investigation and litigation with shareholders. Keeping his other companies private—including Neuralink, xAI, and the Boring Company—has allowed Musk to run his businesses the way he likes without much public scrutiny.

Tesla—the only one of Musk’s six companies that is publicly traded—has, on several occasions, attracted more short-sellers than any other stock in the last several years; Musk’s pay package has been ridiculed and challenged; his tweets have been investigated; and his improbable timelines for product delivery have been picked apart by analysts. Investors punished Tesla stock when Musk stepped away to work in the White House earlier this year, even as SpaceX, thanks to being private, was able to avoid much of the fallout. Indeed, quite the opposite: A share sale this summer pegged SpaceX’s value at $400 billion, while an impending tender offer will double that valuation, according to the Wall Street Journal. 

The fickle tendencies and demands of public investors haven’t only been inconvenient for Musk at Tesla; he’s sometimes taken them as a personal affront. In a 2017 interview, Musk described a heaping $9 billion short position into Tesla as “hurtful.” In March, during the heat of Musk’s episode running President Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency, Musk admitted on Fox News the personal toll the vandalism to Tesla vehicles and showrooms and Tesla’s plummeting stock price had taken on him.

If SpaceX goes public next year, it will be immediately thrown into the frenzy of Wall Street scrutiny over short-term financials, product delays, and costs. Few analysts will be asking Musk about his long-term plans for colonizing Mars. Surely Musk would never subject SpaceX—the beating heart of his broader cosmic ambitions—to the scrutiny that Tesla endures. That is: unless he felt it was the only option. 

Hitting the ceiling of private markets

It’s hard to imagine that Musk would ever take SpaceX public unless the math depended on it. And, to be sure, the math may not, at least in the short term. SpaceX’s CFO has reportedly told employees that whether and when an IPO would take place was “highly uncertain.”

To date, SpaceX has managed to reel in more capital than most other private companies in history. The company has raised more than $10 billion, according to PitchBook, a figure that, just a decade ago, would have sounded absurd. 

Of course, this is 2025, and—as the private markets have exploded as institutional investors like endowments, pension funds, mutual funds, and sovereign wealth funds have sought outsize returns in venture capital funds—companies like the AI juggernaut Musk cofounded, OpenAI, and TikTok owner ByteDance have reached valuations in the hundreds of billions that are well above those of most public companies. An $800 billion tender offer would put SpaceX among the 20 most valuable public companies in the U.S., right alongside JPMorgan Chase, which has an $880 billion market cap, and Walmart, which was worth $931 billion at market close on Monday. 

But the private markets have their limits. While there may be some $2 trillion to $3 trillion in capital sitting on the sidelines, available to deploy into private companies—which is nothing to sneeze at—there is somewhere around $100 trillion to $150 trillion that has been invested in global equities, according to PitchBook emerging technology analyst Ali Javaheri. 

“SpaceX has effectively hit the ceiling of what private markets can support,” Javaheri says. “Financing a multi-decade, industrial-scale road map simply doesn’t map cleanly onto private fund structures.”

In pure numbers, reports peg discussions for a more than $30 billion raise for SpaceX, which would be—in a single listing—about three times the capital the company has raised since its inception in 2002. To be clear, not all that money would go to fund future SpaceX operations. In an IPO, it all comes down to which shareholders choose to float shares, and it remains to be seen how many shares—if any—SpaceX would list itself.

But it’s hard to imagine a scenario where SpaceX didn’t raise any money at all, or was simply under pressure from shareholders to give them an opportunity to cash out. The company does regular liquidity events, and there is never a shortage of demand. SpaceX’s board includes personal confidants as well as investors who have already made a fortune off Musk’s various companies, and it would seem unlikely they’d be putting any kind of pressure on Musk to take the company public.

Given that SpaceX is already profitable, and therefore likely doesn’t need immediate cash to continue operation, SpaceX must need capital for some of its impending priorities.

If you follow Musk’s X account and public comments closely, he has suggested a series of places that money might go: the rollout of Starlink for mobile devices, data centers in space, Starlink factories on the moon, and a Starlink-esque satellite network around Mars. There’s the whole defense business, Star Shield, which we know so little about. SpaceX is also working on new Starship launch pads.

All of this will cost money—and a lot of it.

More scrutiny going public

Preparing SpaceX for an IPO would be a headache for Musk. For one, SpaceX would probably need to make some adjustments to its board. As we learned with Tesla early last year, there will be skepticism over whether its members are adequately independent—or if their ties are too close to the founder.

In the heat of the litigation over Musk’s compensation package agreement with Tesla, a judge determined that the process for approval for Musk’s compensation was “deeply flawed,” because of Musk’s close personal and financial ties with the members of the compensation committee, which included SpaceX board member Antonio Gracias.

Based on Fortune’s reporting, SpaceX’s board currently has six members. In addition to Musk and Tesla board member Gracias, who is an investor at Valor Equity Partners and a close friend of Musk’s, there are Luke Nosek, who was also a PayPal cofounder; Steve Jurvetson, one of the original SpaceX investors and a longtime friend of Musk’s; and Gwynne Shotwell, who is an insider as president and COO of SpaceX. The only truly independent board member seems to be Donald Harrison, who is president of global partnerships and corporate development at Google. That board composition could expose SpaceX to pressure from investors and potential litigation if it went public.

It’s “heavily weighted toward insiders and Musk loyalists,” PitchBook’s Javaheri says. “I would expect a meaningful expansion of truly independent board members ahead of any listing.”

There’s also ongoing litigation that would draw scrutiny should SpaceX start having to explain it in annual reports. The company is currently fighting a case with the National Labor Relations Board, over allegations from eight engineers who say they were fired for contributing to and signing an open letter that criticized Musk. In March 2025, an appeals court determined that the case could proceed, after SpaceX had attempted to block the board from pursuing its claims.

Musk’s compensation plan at SpaceX—along with the compensation of all the other top executives, like Shotwell—will become public, too. And, depending on what those plans look like, they could end up provoking more public, and legal, attention.

To infinity and beyond

In 2018, Musk had the phrase “DON’T PANIC” written on the touch screen of a Tesla Roadster that SpaceX launched into space on board the Falcon Heavy it was testing. It was in homage to one of his favorite books, A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, in which that message was written on the cover of a guidebook meant to reassure confused space travelers who might be frightened by the chaotic universe they suddenly found themselves in.

As companies graduate from the private markets to the public, executives must start spending as much time reassuring their shareholders as they do running their businesses. There is a slowdown that happens when you have to explain and answer for the decisions you make, versus just looping in a few people on your board. For people like Musk—someone who will sometimes demand that engineers figure out how to catch a rocket with chopstick arms—there is a constant tension between the predetermined rules and bureaucracy of regulation and the desire to move faster, dream bigger.

At Tesla, Musk must balance his ultimate vision for humanoid robots and self-driving vehicles with quarterly metrics and manufacturing costs. A SpaceX IPO will almost certainly hinder the speed at which his plans for Mars become a reality. At the same time, it may be the money and financing generated via that IPO that is the only means to make it possible.

But, for Musk, it will be a sacrifice. He will have to spend an increasing amount of his time saying the same thing to his investors, over and over: DON’T PANIC.