SpaceX founder Elon Musk announced plans on Wednesday for one of the biggest stock sales ever, by taking a space company public that is currently losing billions of dollars a year.
A filing shows that SpaceX lost $2.6 billion (€2.24bn) from operations last year on $18.7 billion in revenue, and the losses continued at the start of this year.
The prospectus did not put a dollar figure on the amount Musk hopes to raise, but various reports have estimated it at around $75bn (€64.5bn). An offering of that size would easily surpass the current title holder, Saudi Aramco, the oil giant that went public seven years ago and raised $26bn (€22.4bn).
SpaceX, formally known as Space Exploration Technologies Corp., said the money will help finance projects to put people on the Moon and Mars, as part of its goal to make humans an interplanetary species in the face of existential threats that could wipe out civilisation.
"We do not want humans to have the same fate as dinosaurs," the filing states.
