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On April 1, SpaceX filed confidentially for an initial public offering with the US Securities and Exchange Commission. No public document is yet available — a confidential filing allows a company to submit its registration statement for regulatory review before making its financials public.
According to those reports, SpaceX is targeting a valuation of $1.75 trillion and aims to raise up to $75 billion. Bloomberg reported on April 2 that the company has since revised its valuation target above $2 trillion in testing-the-waters conversations with prospective investors. A June listing is the current target. If completed near that size, the offering would surpass Saudi Aramco's $29 billion debut in 2019 as the largest IPO in recorded history.
SpaceX is not going public as a rocket company. What it is pitching is a combined entity that includes Starlink, its satellite internet service, xAI, the artificial intelligence company it acquired in February 2026 in an all-stock transaction that valued the combined entity at $1.25 trillion, and X, the social network formerly known as Twitter. The AI and orbital data centre thesis is central to the valuation.
Terafab, the $20–25 billion chip fabrication joint venture between Tesla, SpaceX, and xAI announced in March, is the planned semiconductor supply layer for those orbital data centres, targeting 2-nanometre process technology and an initial output of 100,000 wafer starts per month. It is also the layer that requires the most scrutiny.
What the AI Layer Actually Looks Like Right Now
On March 12, 2026, Elon Musk posted on X: "xAI was not built right first time around, so is being rebuilt from the foundations up. Same thing happened with Tesla." The post came as the last of xAI's original co-founders were departing.
Manuel Kroiss, who led the pretraining team responsible for developing xAI's foundational models, and Ross Nordeen, who served as a senior operational lead, both left on March 27. They were the last two of eleven co-founders who started xAI with Musk in 2023.
As of that date, none of the original founding team remains.
The same day he acknowledged xAI needed rebuilding, Musk posted that he and Baris Akis, xAI's engineering talent lead, were going back through the company's interview history to reach out to promising candidates who had previously been declined. "Many talented people over the past few years were declined an offer or even an interview @xAI," he wrote. "My apologies."
The rebuilding is already underway. As FinTech Weekly reported in March, xAI brought in Andrew Milich and Jason Ginsberg, who scaled the coding tool Cursor to a $2 billion revenue run rate, and Devendra Chaplot, a co-founder of Mistral AI. These are credentialed hires in a competitive market. They are also new — weeks old at the time of the IPO filing.
What the Prospectus Will Need to Answer
The confidential filing means SpaceX's financials, the structure of the xAI integration, and the terms of the offering are not yet public. Under SEC rules, the company must file a public registration statement at least 15 days before its investor roadshow begins.
That document — expected in April or May according to reports — will be the first time investors can examine the full picture.
The questions that will determine whether the targeted valuation holds are specific. Starlink's subscriber economics and revenue trajectory are the most legible part of the business. The orbital data centre thesis depends on engineering and cost assumptions that have not been publicly tested at scale.
And the xAI integration raises a structural question that the prospectus will need to address directly: what is the AI component of this entity, who is building it, and on what timeline does it generate the value the valuation implies?
Musk's public comparison to Tesla is instructive and precise. Tesla went through its own period of foundational rebuilding — executive turnover, manufacturing crises, years of losses — before becoming one of the most valuable companies on earth. The comparison is not an excuse. It is a precedent. Whether xAI follows a similar trajectory is a question the IPO market will begin pricing before that answer is known.
The public prospectus, when it arrives, will be the first primary document. Until then, the valuation is a number cited by unnamed sources, and the AI thesis rests on a company its own founder has described as needing to be rebuilt from the foundations up.
Editor's note: We are committed to accuracy. If you spot an error or have additional information about the SpaceX IPO filing, please email r[email protected].
