Imagine walking into a bank and asking for the largest loan in history. The banker pulls up your file. You lost nearly $5 billion last year. The year before that, you made $791 million — so things are actually going in the wrong direction. Your newest division is burning through cash at a rate that would make most CFOs physically ill.
Now imagine the banker leans forward and says: "How much do you need?"
That, more or less, is what happened this week when SpaceX filed paperwork for what will almost certainly become the largest initial public offering — that is, the first time a company sells shares to the public — in the history of financial markets. The company wants to raise $75 billion. For context, the previous record was set by Saudi Aramco in 2019, when it raised about $29 billion. SpaceX isn't just breaking that record. It's more than doubling it.
The offering values SpaceX at almost $1.77 trillion — large enough to make it, on arrival, the seventh-largest company in the United States, surpassing Tesla and Berkshire Hathaway. And sitting right at the heart of this story is the most interesting contradiction in business right now: the company asking for all that money posted $18.7 billion in revenue last year and a net loss of more than $4.9 billion.
How does a company lose nearly $5 billion and get valued at nearly $2 trillion? The answer is the business story of the year.
