The IPO filing is careful to note that the sum of those numbers does not include additional revenue streams such as interplanetary travel, asteroid mining and (why not?) moon factories. It refers to the company’s market opportunity as the largest “in human history”, a phrase that appears a dozen times in the document. SpaceX immodestly credits itself with having developed “the most transformative and critical technologies in human history” — apparently putting Grok (the aforementioned chatbot) and its Starlink satellites (which provide broadband internet services on airlines and yachts) slightly ahead of breakthroughs like, say, agriculture and the wheel. A section titled “Why This Matters Now” explains that going public is important because,
Elon Musk is, famously, kind of a lot. He is a thrice-divorced man with at least 14 children by four different women who have spent a significant part of the past few years flirting with White nationalism and promoting a sex chatbot. He is also fabulously successful, having helped transform PayPal, Tesla and SpaceX from start-ups into household names — not to mention his roles in the buyout of Twitter (since rebranded as the anti-woke social network X and swallowed up by SpaceX) and the 2024 election of Donald Trump.
Now he is also a trillionaire. On June 12, SpaceX went public, closing with a market capitalisation of US$2.1 trillion ($2.71 trillion), which sent Musk, who has a roughly 40% stake in the company, to a level of wealth that, as a percentage of US GDP, puts him roughly on par with the richest Gilded Age monopolists. In the minds of Musk and those who bought into the largest IPO in history, SpaceX still has plenty of room to grow. The company’s registration statement with US financial regulators outlines three lines of business — rocket launches, satellite internet, and hardware and software for artificial intelligence — and claims that its total addressable market is US$28.5 trillion, which is almost as big as America’s entire GDP. That calculation includes US$370 billion for rocket launches, US$1.6 trillion in satellite-related revenue and a staggering US$26.5 trillion coming from the data centres Musk plans to launch into space.
