Elon Musk is getting ready to see how much public investors will pay for his literal moonshots.

SpaceX is working toward a mid- to late-2026 IPO that, according to Bloomberg, could raise significantly more than $30 billion at a valuation of about $1.5 trillion. If bankers hit those numbers, it would be the biggest stock-market debut on record, leapfrogging Saudi Aramco’s roughly $29 billion listing in 2019 and dropping a rocket company straight into the same valuation airspace as Meta or Amazon.

The deal would bring the entire SpaceX machine — rockets, Starlink satellites, a growing defense business, plus a slate of off-world infrastructure projects — onto public markets in one shot, not just the Starlink unit Musk once dangled as a standalone IPO after its cash flow turned “predictable.” Analysts and bankers are modeling revenue of around $15 billion in 2025 and $22 billion to $24 billion in 2026, with Starlink doing most of the work, which means investors would be paying something like 60 to 70 times next year’s sales for a company that still blows up prototypes on livestreams.

SpaceX’s pitch is that this is no ordinary industrial listing. A chunk of the IPO cash is reportedly earmarked for space-based data centers and the chips to run them — essentially turning low-Earth orbit into a cloud region — on top of funding Starship, more Starlink launches, and presumably some classified work that keeps the Pentagon on speed dial. All of that makes for a seductive growth story if you believe in off-planet infrastructure... and a very expensive science project if you don’t.

In 2013, Musk told his social media followers there were “no near term plans” to IPO SpaceX and that any listing was “only possible in [the] very long term when Mars Colonial Transporter is flying regularly.” Five years later, company president Gwynne Shotwell was still saying, “We can’t go public until we’re flying regularly to Mars.” Well, then.

Private markets have been rehearsing this moment for a while. A tender offer in late 2023 valued SpaceX at about $175 billion; by the end of 2024, an insider share sale had pushed that figure to roughly $350 billion, making it — at the time — the world’s most valuable startup on paper. (OpenAI briefly leapfrogged SpaceX.) The Wall Street Journal then reported talks around a secondary sale at an $800 billion valuation, which would have made SpaceX the most richly priced private company in the U.S.; Musk fired back on X that those fundraising reports were “not accurate” and pointed instead to years of positive cash flow and regular buybacks to give employees liquidity. And now: over $1 trillion.

Public investors would be buying into a company that already launches more than 80% of global payload weight, runs a fast-growing satellite internet service, and sits at the center of U.S. space and defense strategy — and whose CEO is simultaneously running Tesla, X, xAI, and a live feed of his own impulses. A blockbuster IPO at this scale wouldn’t just raise capital for rockets and data centers; it would lock in another gigantic public-market currency that Musk can use as a lever against everything else he touches. Oh, and a successful listing at a $1.5 trillion marker would more than double Musk’s already staggering net worth and hand him a second mega-cap stock to wield alongside Tesla.

If SpaceX does ring the bell in 2026, the story investors are buying is a record-scale space-and-infrastructure bet valued somewhere north of $1 trillion — plus a fresh test of how much volatility they’re still willing to underwrite from Musk.

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