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 exchange 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

The short version: SpaceX’s order books for the IPO will close tomorrow ahead of the start of trading. Musk set the company’s share price at $135 and a valuation of $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 biggest IPO in history is being built on retail investors. The order books for the largest stock offering in history will close tomorrow, Thursday, ahead of the start of trading in Elon Musk’s SpaceX shares on Nasdaq. When trading begins on Friday, we will finally know whether Musk upgrades his title from the world’s richest person to the world’s first trillionaire, a personal fortune of one trillion dollars, that is, 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 currently holds shares and options in his electric car company Tesla worth more than $300 billion, and the SpaceX 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. Meanwhile, investor demand ahead of the IPO 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 done at a fantastical company valuation of $1.77 trillion. But despite the enormous enthusiasm from investors, there are also many troubling questions surrounding this giant offering about the reality behind the big numbers and the dream Musk is selling to the world.

Trump and Musk watch a SpaceX rocket launch (archive) | Photo: AP

What exactly are you buying in SpaceX?

Part of the challenge around SpaceX’s valuation is that it is not entirely clear what it even is. In recent months, Musk has 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 were getting, as part of a bundle, activity that Morningstar diplomatically called a “potential source of value destruction.”

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Dr. Cyndi 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.” The Guardian columnist Nils Pratley was blunter, calling X “space junk that does not belong to SpaceX.”

Musk announces the purchase of the X network through xAI (archive) | Photo: Reuters

What are the numbers based on?

That $1.77 trillion valuation at which SpaceX is being listed was in fact determined by Musk himself, in an unusual move that is not common in IPOs. Musk chose to skip the meetings with major investors and the process of adjusting the share price according to demand, and simply set the price at $135. That valuation puts SpaceX among the ten most valuable companies in the world by market cap, unusually so given 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 network 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 amount is based on Musk’s future promises, artificial intelligence, data centers in space, 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 the valuation set by Musk.

Musk’s creative bonuses

Musk did not settle for making the SpaceX offering turn him into a trillionaire, he also included an original compensation plan in the company’s prospectus. In January, the company’s board approved allocating him one billion additional shares that would be transferred to him gradually, on condition that he meet especially ambitious targets, a market cap 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 output of the entire State of Israel.

Starship prototypes from SpaceX (archive) | Photo: Reuters

A historic opportunity for the small investor?

One of the unusual things about the SpaceX 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 stocks independently for their own accounts rather than through investment managers or managing entities. This is an unusually high share compared with the 5% to 10% usually allocated to these investors in regular offerings.

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

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But some see this generosity differently: analysts cited by Bloomberg said Musk is knowingly relying on his fan base, those who will buy shares out of enthusiasm and belief in him and his ability, rather than on the basis of a cool financial analysis of the offering. They also will not question for a second the share price Musk dictated. And unlike large institutional investors, they are also unlikely to rush to sell if the excitement fades and the company’s value begins to decline.

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

The power Musk is keeping for himself

The analysts criticizing 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, which state that he will retain 82.4% of the voting rights even after the offering, and will continue to hold all the top roles at the same time, CEO, chairman of the board, and controlling shareholder.

Musk did not invent the practice in which company founders create stock-market maneuvers that allow them to retain control of a company even if they no longer hold a majority of the shares, but he appears 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 essentially “the dubious privilege of owning a company over which you have no influence on the way it is run.”

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SpaceX | Photo: AP

Not everyone is troubled by this, as the huge 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 anywhere near the offering. Some commentators note that anyone who refused to invest in Tesla because of a dislike of Musk missed its surge, but in the electric car company there are still legal and corporate brakes that at times at least 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 in SpaceX there would be no one who could stop him.