From 1h agoIntroduction: SpaceX aimes for largest IPO ever with $1.8tn valuationGood morning, and welcome to our rolling coverage of busines, the financial markets and the world economy.“Rockets are hard,” as Elon Musk pointed out last week after rival Jeff Bezos’s New Glenn rocket exploded during a test in Florida last week. But launching the world’s largest stock market flotation is also a challenge.Musk’s SpaceX has announced that it plans to IPO at a valuation of $1.78tn, which would be the largest stock market float ever.Plans filed last night show that SpaceX plans to raise $75bn, although that could rise to $86bn if the banks underwriting the deal take up an option to sell additional sharesIf successful, this will rank as the largest IPO in history, overtaking Saudi Aramco’s float in 2019, and put Musk on track to be a trillionaire.But while SpaceX’s rocket operations, and its ambitions for orbital artificial intelligence data centres, are ambitious, so is its IPO valuation.The company posted a net loss of $4.94bn in 2025, Reuters points out, with revenue rising 33% to $18.67bn.That means it is targeting an astrononic valuation of over 90 times its annual revenues (investors would rather value companies as a multiple of its profits….).Floating on the stock market will give SpaceX access to a fresh source of capital. But it will also allow insiders to cash out some of their profits on SpaceX, by selling their shares to ordinary investors. Index fund trackers and pensions funds will provide some of this ‘exit liquidity’, meaning we could soon all find we have a stake in Musk’s ambitions.Some analysts have questioned SpaceX’s mega valuation.Financial data firm Morningstar warned earlier this week that the company is “significantly overvalued.”Assessing the future value of the space economy is tricky; Morningstar’s discounted cash flow valuation of SpaceX (based on its future cash flows) is $780bn, and they say: