SpaceX’s prospectus is a tricky one for sceptics. Where do you start, given there is so much to be sceptical about?Do you focus on language that talks of extending “the light of consciousness to the stars”, a “perpetually expanding spacefaring civilisation” and warns about humans avoiding the fate of dinosaurs? It’s not conventional S-1 prose, that’s for sure.Do you focus on the expected $1.75 trillion (€1.5 trillion) valuation, like the FT’s Lex column (“How to make sense of SpaceX’s nonsensical valuation”), or Panmure Liberum’s Joachim Klement, who drily described a price/sales ratio of 93.7 as “quite ambitious”?Do you pause at the purchase at full retail price of 1,279 of Tesla’s slow-selling Cybertrucks, a $131 million deal that raises questions about whose interests were being prioritised?Do you focus on the governance structure, where Elon Musk retains about 50 per cent ownership but more than 85 per cent of voting power, making him effectively unfireable?Or do you follow the document to where it wants you to go: the apparent $28.5 trillion market opportunity, “the largest actionable total addressable market in human history”? It’s quite the sum – $28.5 trillion is almost as much as the GDP of the United States ($32.4 trillion), and is more than a quarter of global GDP.Roughly 90 per cent of this figure pertains not to space but to AI and adjacent data-centre services. SpaceX’s message, quipped Gary Marcus, a long-time critic of AI hype, is it will “take a big slice” of a gigantic market “that we project will exist, primarily in a field in which we have almost no current presence, which is remote from what we are best known for”.Strip out the AI component and the question becomes what the underlying space market looks like. SpaceX’s own breakdown puts traditional space and Starlink connectivity at almost $2 trillion, but Klement notes independent estimates of the broader space economy are closer to $350 billion by the end of the decade. SpaceX’s IPO may be the largest in history but, to repeat, there’s much to be sceptical about.