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On Thursday, Elon Musk became the world’s first trillionaire. The mechanism was straightforward: SpaceX priced its IPO at $135 per share — a fixed price, without the conventional book-building process that allows markets to discover value through competitive bids — valuing the company at $1.77 trillion. Shares opened at $150. They hit $175 in early trading. The market capitalisation briefly crossed $2 trillion. Institutional order books had reportedly reached $250 billion in bids before pricing, leaving the offering three to four times oversubscribed. By any conventional measure, the largest IPO in history was an unqualified success.
Two Companies in One Ticker
SpaceX, under the ticker SPCX, is not a single business. It is, financially speaking, a profitable satellite internet company stapled to a loss-making AI and social media conglomerate — and the staple is load-bearing in ways the IPO narrative obscures.
Starlink, SpaceX’s satellite internet service, delivered $11.4 billion in revenue in 2025, with an operating profit of $4.4 billion. That business is real, growing, and genuinely remarkable: a vertically integrated broadband service reaching markets where terrestrial infrastructure cannot compete, with a subscriber base generating $81 in average monthly revenue and a federal contract backlog exceeding $22 billion. It is the engine that justifies institutional enthusiasm.
xAI, the AI division absorbed in SpaceX’s $250 billion acquisition of Musk’s AI venture in February 2026, tells a starkly different story: a loss from operations of $6.35 billion on revenue of $3.2 billion in 2025. In the first quarter of 2026 alone, xAI burned through $2.47 billion against $818 million in revenue. The S-1 is admirably candid about this: the Grok model family, the Colossus supercomputing cluster, and the social platform X are all consuming capital at a rate that Starlink’s profits alone cannot sustain. The IPO raises $75 billion, eclipsing Saudi Aramco’s $29.4 billion record, in substantial part to fund a division whose path to profitability remains unspecified.
The Price That Has No Precedent
The valuation arithmetic at $135 per share places SpaceX at approximately 94 times its 2025 revenue. That multiple has no precedent among the world’s most valuable companies. At $18.7 billion in combined 2025 revenue, SpaceX generates less than a tenth of what Amazon, Apple, or Alphabet produce — yet it enters public markets at a valuation higher than Meta and Tesla combined on a revenue basis. To be conventionally priced relative to large-cap technology peers, SpaceX would need to be generating somewhere between $150 billion and $175 billion in annual revenue. It is not close to that figure today, and no credible near-term projection suggests it will be.
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Bearish analysts warn of potential corrections to $75 per share based on fundamental metrics — a figure that implies a market cap of roughly $975 billion, still extraordinary by any historical standard, but roughly half the IPO price. The spread between that floor and the opening day peak of $175 represents the speculative premium investors are placing on Starship’s long-term potential, xAI’s eventual profitability, and Musk’s record of confounding expectations. That premium is not irrational, but it is very large, and it is being financed by retail investors who will arrive at the stock after institutional allocations have been filled.
The AI Accounting Question Nobody Is Asking Loudly Enough
The detail in SpaceX’s S-1 that deserves more attention than it has received is the Anthropic compute contract. In March 2026, SpaceX’s Colossus data centre secured a deal with Anthropic worth $1.25 billion per month through May 2029 — a facility housing 220,000 Nvidia GPUs across 300MW of power. However, either party can terminate with 90 days’ notice.
That contract is worth approximately $40 billion over its stated life and represents the single largest line of external revenue for the xAI infrastructure business. It is also, structurally, a purchase order rather than a committed recurring revenue stream. Anthropic, which filed its own confidential S-1 with the SEC on June 1 at a $965 billion valuation and $47 billion in annualised revenue, has every incentive to diversify its compute supply as it approaches a public listing. A contract that either party can exit with 90 days’ notice is not the same as a contracted revenue backlog — and the distinction matters acutely for a division whose losses the IPO proceeds are being raised to fund.
This is not a fatal flaw. It is an accounting clarity problem: investors in SPCX are being asked to assign significant value to a compute infrastructure business whose largest customer is a company simultaneously building its own path to independence from that infrastructure. The market will resolve this ambiguity through the quarterly earnings calls that follow the listing. SpaceX’s first report as a public company will be, for analysts focused on the xAI segment, the most important disclosure of the year.
What the $2 trillion debut confirmed is that the era of trillion-dollar AI listings has formally arrived. What it has not confirmed — and what no opening day price can confirm — is whether the businesses inside those listings can ultimately justify the expectations being placed on them.
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