The biggest IPO ever filed yesterday — and the strangest one
Imagine being handed a share certificate that says, in effect: this company will be run by one man, almost no matter what you think, and if he manages to put a million people on Mars, he gets another billion shares as a thank-you.
That is, in plain language, what SpaceX put in front of the Securities and Exchange Commission this week. The rocket and satellite company filed paperwork to go public at a valuation of $1.75 trillion, aiming to raise as much as $75 billion. To put that number in perspective, the previous record holder for the biggest stock market debut, Saudi Aramco, raised about $25.6 billion in 2019. SpaceX is proposing to triple it.
But the headline number is the most ordinary thing about this filing. Tucked inside the prospectus — the long legal document a company has to publish before selling shares — are details that read less like a normal investment pitch and more like the founding charter of a small country. Elon Musk would keep 85% of the voting power through a special class of shares. A separate clause grants him an extra billion shares if SpaceX successfully establishes a permanent human colony on Mars. And the AI company Anthropic, a direct rival to Musk's own xAI, will pay SpaceX $1.25 billion every single month to rent computing power from satellites in orbit.
That's a lot to take in. Here's the quick version.
