🗂️ The SpaceX Files
San Francisco native (yes, really). @uw and Lowell High alum. I like to nerd out on fintech, stock options and taxes.
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San Francisco native (yes, really). @uw and Lowell High alum. I like to nerd out on fintech, stock options and taxes.
Hey there,
Vieje back here. It’s a new quarter, and things are heating up, both literally and figuratively. It hit almost 80 degrees out here in New York, and after a brutal winter of snow and toddler illnesses, I’m ready for some sun.
In the markets, SpaceX confidentially filed its S-1 with the SEC. Yes, I am writing this on April 1st. No, this is not a joke.
If you've been following the IPO market at all, you know this has been coming for years. This is a genuinely historic moment, and this is likely going to be the most talked-about IPO in history. We’ll be writing about SpaceX in Founders & Funders a lot more, but to kick things off, I wanted to break down what it could mean for the markets, other pre-IPO startups, and introduce the storylines to watch in a short newsletter.
Let's get into it.
SpaceX is targeting a valuation of $1.75 trillion and is looking to raise up to $75 billion in its IPO, with a June listing reportedly on track1.
To put that in context: the current record for the largest IPO in history is Saudi Aramco at $29 billion in 20192. SpaceX would blow past that by more than two and a half times.
At $1.75 trillion, SpaceX would be larger than every company in the S&P 500 except Nvidia, Apple, Alphabet, Microsoft, and Amazon. Bigger than Meta. Bigger than Tesla. It would be the largest aerospace company ever to go public by a huge margin.
And SpaceX isn't really just a rocket company anymore. In February, the company completed a merger with Elon Musk's AI venture xAI, combining rockets, Starlink's satellite internet business, and AI infrastructure under one roof. The offering is internally codenamed "Project Apex" and has 21 banks lined up to manage it, including Goldman, Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan, and Bank of America.
The S-1 is confidential for now, which means SpaceX gets to work through SEC disclosures privately. But they'll have to release the full public filing at least 15 days before the roadshow kicks off, meaning that we should get our first real look at SpaceX's financials sometime in May. That document is going to be the most-read S1 in market history. I personally cannot wait.
Here's where it gets interesting beyond just SpaceX.
There's been a quiet but real conversation happening on Wall Street about what a $1.75 trillion IPO does to everyone else. The IPO market raised about $170 billion in 2025, which was the best in three years, but still well below historical norms. A lot of companies have been patiently waiting for their window.
SpaceX could complicate that window.
When a deal this size hits the market, institutional investors who invest in IPOs have to make portfolio decisions. They have finite capacity. SpaceX doesn't just take up a line item; it can force large-scale rebalancing that crowds out other offerings entirely. Many pre-IPO companies have already written off most of 2026 to go public because they don’t want to be overshadowed by SpaceX.
There's also a weird technical problem brewing. Musk is keeping tight control of SpaceX, which means only a tiny fraction of shares will actually be available for the public to buy. But if SpaceX gets added to the S&P 500, every index fund in America would be required to own it. That's a lot of funds chasing very few shares, which could send the price sky-high fast, not necessarily because the business justifies it, but just because of forced buying mechanics. The S&P is literally rewriting its own rulebook to figure out how to handle this.
A wildly successful SpaceX IPO could be exactly the confidence boost the market needs to open the floodgates for everyone else. If SpaceX works, OpenAI, Anthropic, and others may follow. If it stumbles, a lot of late-stage companies will likely stay private a lot longer.
SpaceX has always been a bit of a unicorn in how its equity works. The company runs semi-annual tender offers that have been the primary liquidity mechanism for employees for years now. There's been no IPO, but employees haven't been fully locked up either. The last tender priced at an $800B valuation in late 20253, nearly double the prior offering. So all SpaceX employees have already had chances to take some chips off the table.
Perhaps the more juicy story is from the investor side. Investor demand for SpaceX shares has always greatly outweighed the supply of shares, which has given rise to the special purpose vehicle (SPV). SpaceX has a famously complex ownership structure with a huge network of SPVs and sub-SPVs that have accumulated through years of secondary trading.
Here's the thing most people don't realize: most of the trading in SpaceX shares hasn't involved shares actually changing hands. Early investors and employees put shares of SpaceX into SPVs and then sold interest in those SPVs to other investors. Those investors who own those interests may have also put their interest in an SPV and sold it off to other investors. This has created a unique and complex network of multi-layered SPVs over the years.
For investors sitting two, three, or more layers deep in those structures, IPO day might not be the clean exit they're picturing. Depending on how those vehicles are structured, they could face additional fees, separate lockup provisions, or legal restrictions before they see any liquidity. Many of these investors in SPVs truly have no idea what they actually own beyond the amount of cash they put in.
The amount of wealth on top of the growing SPV issue is going to be one to watch amongst many other storylines as we get closer to the IPO.
A few additional things I'll be tracking as this plays out:
More to come on all of this as we get closer to June, as we approach the summer of SpaceX.