Elon Musk Is Launching Himself Toward a Trillion Dollars, and No One Seems Able to Stop Him

Tomorrow, registration for the largest offering in history will close, and on Friday Elon Musk’s SpaceX will begin trading on Nasdaq at a fantastical valuation of $1.77 trillion. The event will make the world’s richest man the first trillionaire in the world, and demand to take part in the celebration is greater than the market can absorb. So why are there still people in the capital markets who say Musk is selling “space junk”?

Published: 10.06.26, 22:30

Elon Musk in an Occupy Mars shirt, archive | Photo: Reuters

In brief: The SpaceX order books will close tomorrow ahead of the start of trading. Musk set the company’s share price at $135 and its valuation at $1.77 trillion. Commentators say Musk is pushing investors “space junk” in the form of xAI and the X network. Musk will retain full control of the company and has secured unusual bonuses for himself.

Why it matters: The largest IPO in history is being built on retail investors.

The order books for the largest share offering in history will close tomorrow, Thursday, ahead of the start of trading in Elon Musk’s SpaceX stock on Nasdaq. When trading begins on Friday, we will finally know whether Musk upgrades his title from the world’s richest man to the world’s first trillionaire, with a personal fortune of $1 trillion, or 1,000 billion dollars. This is wealth on paper, not cash in the bank, and its value depends on continued investor confidence. But even so, no one has been there before him.

Musk today holds Tesla shares and options worth more than $300 billion in his electric car company, and SpaceX’s offering is expected to add another more than $800 billion, bringing the value of his holdings in the two companies together above the trillion-dollar mark for the first time. For now, investor demand ahead of the offering already tells much of the story. According to Reuters, demand stands at more than $250 billion, four times the amount Musk and SpaceX are seeking to raise. The offering itself will be carried out at a fantastical company valuation of $1.77 trillion.

But despite the huge excitement among investors, around this giant offering there are also many troubling questions about the reality behind the big numbers and the dream Musk is marketing to the world.

Donald Trump and Musk watch a SpaceX rocket launch, archive | Photo: AP, AP

What exactly are you buying in SpaceX?

Part of the challenge surrounding SpaceX’s valuation is that it is not clear what it actually is. In recent months, Musk merged into what had been a successful space company the controversial AI company xAI, along with the social network X, formerly Twitter. The result is that investors who thought they were buying a ticket to space discovered they are also getting, in the bundle, a business that Morningstar diplomatically described as a “potential source of value destruction.”

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Dr. Sindy O’Sullivan, an economist who previously worked at NASA, told the BBC that the merger creates a company that cannot be defined: “The brand is built on two decades of rockets, but in practice most of the spending is on data centers and an AI company that looks like a social network.” Guardian columnist Nils Pratley was blunter, calling X “space junk that does not belong to SpaceX.”

Musk announces the acquisition of X by xAI, archive | Photo: Reuters

What are the numbers based on?

That $1.77 trillion valuation at which SpaceX is being listed was in fact set by Musk himself, in an unusual move that is not standard in offerings. Musk chose to skip meetings with major investors and the usual price discovery process and simply set the share price at $135. That valuation places SpaceX among the ten most valuable companies in the world, an especially unusual figure considering that, according to the prospectus filed with Nasdaq, it lost nearly $5 billion last year.

In practice, 70% of the company’s revenue comes from its Starlink satellite internet operation, which is considered its real profitable business. But even the most optimistic estimates value Starlink at no more than $300 billion. The rest of the sum rests on Musk’s future promises, artificial intelligence, space data centers, and flights to the Moon and Mars.

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SpaceX launch | Photo: Reuters

For comparison, Morningstar recently estimated SpaceX’s value at $780 billion, less than half of the valuation set by Musk.

Musk’s creative bonuses

Musk did not stop at making SpaceX’s offering turn him into a trillionaire, he also included an original compensation plan in the company’s prospectus. Last January, the board approved allocating him an additional one billion shares to be transferred to him gradually, provided he meets especially ambitious goals, a market capitalization of $7.5 trillion and the establishment of a permanent colony on Mars with one million residents.

According to Bloomberg, the value of this potential share package is about $760 billion, more than the annual gross domestic product of the State of Israel.

StarShip prototypes at SpaceX, archive | Photo: Reuters

A historic opportunity for the small investor?

One of the unusual things about SpaceX’s offering is that Musk is allocating up to 30% of the shares to private investors, also known as retail investors, meaning people who buy and trade shares independently for their own personal accounts and not through investment managers or managing entities. This is an unusually high share compared with the 5% to 10% typically allocated to such investors in regular offerings.

On the face of it, this looks like a rare opportunity Musk is giving the general public to become partners in the company from the moment it enters the market.

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But there are also those who see this generosity differently: analysts quoted by Bloomberg noted that Musk is deliberately relying on his fan base, people who will buy shares out of enthusiasm and faith in him and his ability, not on the basis of a cold economic analysis of the offering. They will also not question for a second the share price Musk has dictated. And unlike large institutional investors, they are also unlikely to rush to sell if enthusiasm fades and the company’s value starts to decline.

A statue in the likeness of Elon Musk, in Texas | Photo: Reuters

The power Musk is keeping for himself

The analysts who criticize Musk’s courting of small private investors point to another problem: even after they invest money, SpaceX’s new shareholders will have no influence over the company’s management. The reason is rules Musk inserted into the company’s bylaws stating that he will retain 82.4% of the voting rights even after the offering, and will continue simultaneously to hold all senior positions, chief executive officer, chairman of the board, and controlling owner.

Musk did not invent the practice by which company founders create market maneuvers that allow them to continue controlling a company even if they no longer hold a majority of the shares, but he seems to be taking this controversial practice to a new extreme. A large institutional investor told the BBC that what Musk is selling investors here is in effect “the dubious privilege of owning a company over the way it is run, over which you have no influence.”

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SpaceX | Photo: AP

Not everyone is troubled by this, as the enormous demand for SpaceX shares from established investment funds ahead of the offering shows, but some are. Bloomberg reported on a Danish pension fund worth $25 billion that said it would not go near the offering. Some commentators note that those who refused to invest in Tesla because of an aversion to Musk missed its surge, but in the electric car company there are still legal and corporate checks that at least occasionally slow Musk down.

It may be that the brakes at Tesla are what led the world’s richest man to make sure in advance that at SpaceX there would be no one who could stop him.

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