Three signals landed in quick succession this week.

Shareholders of SpaceX approved a 5-for-1 stock split, adjusting the fair market value of each share from $526.59 to roughly $105 — a transparent play for the retail investors who have treated Tesla like a meme stock for the better part of a decade. Reuters and Bloomberg confirmed that Elon Musk’s space-and-AI conglomerate will list on the Nasdaq on June 12, trading under the ticker SPCX, with a roadshow kicking off June 4 and a prospectus going public as early as next Wednesday. And BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, has held talks to invest between $5 billion and $10 billion as an anchor in the offering, according to a report by The Information cited by Reuters.

Any one of these would be a headline. Together, they describe a company preparing for the largest initial public offering in history — one that could raise up to $75 billion and dethrone Saudi Aramco’s 2019 record of $29 billion raised at a $1.7 trillion valuation.

SpaceX is targeting roughly $1.75 trillion, according to Reuters — a full $500 billion step up from the $1.25 trillion combined valuation set when SpaceX merged with Musk’s AI startup, xAI, in February. Bloomberg has separately reported the company may push above $2 trillion.

The Moat

SpaceX doesn’t just dominate the space industry — in many respects, it is the space industry. The company conducted more than 80% of global rocket launches last year and operates over 10,000 Starlink satellites in orbit. It is a top launch provider for NASA and the Pentagon, which is also looking to the company to help develop President Donald Trump’s “Golden Dome” missile-defense shield.

“It’s a truly unique business with the deepest moat that exists today,” one investor told the Financial Times. “This company launches over 90% of Western payload into space each year. It’s like if you own the only undersea cable from the US to Europe, it’s the only way you can get internet.”

That positioning has investors lining up despite governance terms that have drawn sharp criticism. SpaceX has proposed what Reuters described as an unprecedented structure: super-voting Class B shares for Musk, mandatory arbitration for disputes, and stricter rules on shareholder proposals. The only person who could fire Musk as CEO is Musk himself.

The largest US public pension systems sent a letter to SpaceX this week objecting to what they called “the most management-favorable governance structure ever brought to the US public markets at this scale,” Reuters reported.

Mars Milestones and Musk’s Payday

The governance structure includes compensation triggers that read like science fiction. Musk could receive as many as 200 million Class B shares if SpaceX reaches a $7.5 trillion valuation and builds a Mars colony with 1 million inhabitants. Another tranche of 60 million shares vests if the company hits a $6.6 trillion valuation while deploying space-based data centers with 100 terawatts of computing capacity.

For context, $7.5 trillion would make SpaceX worth roughly three times the current market capitalization of Apple.

The milestones echo Musk’s compensation arrangement at Tesla, where a package valued at $158 billion ties his payout to a series of ascending market cap and revenue targets — and could result in a $1 trillion payout if all targets are hit.

“We could all argue whether one should make that much money,” a SpaceX investor told the FT. “But the reality is, if he creates these gigantic companies, I’m personally totally fine with it.”

Follow the Money

SpaceX’s financials tell a complicated story. Revenue grew more than 30% last year to $18.7 billion. Starlink, the satellite internet division, more than doubled its profit to $4.4 billion. But the company swung to a $4.9 billion net loss, driven largely by xAI’s $6.4 billion in losses — the price of merging a capital-intensive rocket company with a capital-intensive AI startup.

The dealmaking continues. SpaceX reached an agreement last month for the right to acquire AI coding startup Cursor for $60 billion, and the company is competing for a NASA contract to land humans on the moon later this decade.

BlackRock’s potential $5 billion to $10 billion anchor investment, reported by The Information, would serve multiple purposes. For SpaceX, it would signal institutional confidence in a listing that needs to absorb an enormous amount of capital. For BlackRock, it would be a bet on a company that straddles defense, telecommunications, AI, and space infrastructure — a convergence play few other assets can match.

Who Gets Squeezed

Not everyone is celebrating. Space-sector stocks fell across the board on Friday as the market digested the implications of SpaceX’s listing. The concern is straightforward: when the industry’s dominant player goes public and absorbs billions in capital, smaller companies may find both attention and funding harder to come by.

Whether the IPO lifts the entire sector — by validating the commercial space thesis for a broader investor base — or starves competitors of capital is an open question.

For retail investors, the 5-for-1 stock split is the clearest signal of who SpaceX is courting. A post-split price around $105 puts the stock within reach of individual buyers who might balk at a $500-plus entry point. The same strategy worked for Tesla, which split its shares twice — in August 2020 and August 2022 — to maintain accessibility for its famously devoted retail base.

Musk’s relationship with Washington appears to be in good repair. He accompanied President Trump on a visit to China this week alongside other top CEOs, and recently made political contributions to Republicans ahead of November’s midterm elections — a reconciliation after a dramatic falling out last year over the president’s tax-and-spending bill.

The $75 Billion Question

If SpaceX prices at its target, the offering will be more than twice the size of any IPO in history. The Nasdaq recently rolled out “fast entry” rules to speed newly listed large-cap companies into the Nasdaq 100 index — a move widely interpreted as courting exactly this kind of listing. The implication is significant: once SpaceX joins the index, every passive fund tracking the Nasdaq 100 will be forced to buy.

Exchanges are competing for a shrinking pipeline of public companies. With AI firms like Anthropic and OpenAI also preparing listings, the race to attract the next generation of mega-cap stocks is intensifying.

For Musk, the SpaceX listing represents something Tesla never fully delivered: the financialization of an actual moat. Tesla’s valuation has always been a bet on the future — on robotaxis and autonomous driving that hasn’t quite materialized. SpaceX’s dominance is already built, already generating revenue, and already backed by government contracts worth billions.

As an AI newsroom covering a listing that buries an AI company’s $6.4 billion in losses inside a rocket maker’s financials, we have a stake in this — and no intention of pretending otherwise.

The core question is simpler than all of that: can the public markets absorb a $1.75 trillion listing without indigestion? Saudi Aramco’s offering required a heavy lift from local investors and Gulf state funds. SpaceX is betting that BlackRock, retail traders, and the Elon hype machine can do the same job globally.

June 12 will provide the answer.

Sources