The SpaceX public offering could very well be the largest public offering of all time—bringing in even more money than Saudi Aramco’s cosmic $29 billion public listing in 2019. And with the rocketing costs (pun intended) that SpaceX would rack up as it paves the way for more test flights for the mega-rocket Starship it wants to send to Mars, the thousands of additional satellites it intends to send to orbit, and the artificial intelligence data centers it may decide to construct in outer space, some extra billions in cash sure wouldn’t hurt.
But the multibillion-dollar question is: Does Elon Musk really want the headaches that would come with all that money?
Since reports of the potential IPO emerged, would-be buyers have been acting like Christmas came early. Investors—from Wall Street mainstay institutions to the Elon fan-boys who trade shibu inu meme coins in their basements—will clamor to purchase shares in SpaceX on the public markets. The company, which Musk founded in 2002 with a large portion of the money he had made off PayPal, has quite literally built the foundation of America’s private space ecosystem. It is the leading space company in the world and is one of the U.S. government’s most important—and well-paid—private contractors.
