It’s finally official: SpaceX will IPO in 2026.
For about a week, multiple media outlets have reported rumors that the world’s largest and most profitable private space company is considering first a private stock sale at an $800 billion valuation (“to provide liquidity to employees and investors,” according to Elon Musk) and then a full-scale initial public offering (IPO) that would make SpaceX a public company worth $1.5 trillion.
The $800 billion price tag will be twice The private market value of SpaceX’s most recent financing.
A price of $1.5 trillion would be nearly 4x.
In a column last week, Ars Technica’s Eric Berger confirmed the rumor — or at least the IPO part. He can also guess Why SpaceX is about to go public. (and Elon Musk Confirmed that he guessed correctly. )
Berger wrote: “Raising a significant amount of capital over the next 18 months will allow Musk to have significant capital to deploy SpaceX.” What Musk intends to do with the money is “to develop improved versions of Starlink satellites as the basis for building data centers in space.”
Eventually, the SpaceX CEO wants to build a “satellite factory” on the moon and build an “electromagnetic railgun” there to “accelerate AI satellites to lunar escape velocity without rockets.” This will enable SpaceX to launch “100TW artificial intelligence” data center satellites into space every year to provide artificial intelligence (AI) services to everyone on Earth (much like SpaceX already provides Internet services to Earth through its Starlink satellites).
Therefore, SpaceX’s IPO is a means to end SpaceX’s dominance of artificial intelligence on earth.
As business plans go, this sounds a bit far-fetched—perhaps even a “moonshot.” But this is far from the only arrow in SpaceX’s quiver.
With just a few weeks left in 2025, SpaceX has launched its Falcon 9 rocket more than 160 times, accounting for more than half of all launches by all companies (and countries) in the world. The company achieved the milestone of 500 successful landings in October – the most by any company on the planet. (Number two is Blue Origin, which has already landed once.) One particular Falcon booster, known as “B1067,” has launched and landed an incredible 32 times, with turnaround times between flights as short as three weeks.
SpaceX launches a rocket about every two days, and the vast majority of those launches are satellites for the company’s Starlink satellite internet constellation.
Starlink itself currently has more than 9,000 satellites in orbit, primarily providing satellite internet, but many satellites are tasked with providing direct-to-cell mobile communications for cell phones and other devices performing military missions as part of Starshield. Starlink deployments should accelerate once SpaceX irons out the bugs on its larger Starship rocket.
and SpaceX has other projects, from building landers to return astronauts to the moon, to sending space tourists into Earth orbit, and now potentially building artificial intelligence data centers in space.
The last time I tried to value SpaceX was in 2019, when it was a much smaller company with annual revenue of about $2 billion and a private market cap of about $30.5 billion. Six years later, SpaceX’s annual revenue is expected to reach $15 billion (mainly from Starlink). Analysts at Payload Space estimate that revenue will grow at a rate of 50% or more and could reach $22 billion to $24 billion next year.
Relative to that revenue, a $1.5 trillion IPO would value SpaceX at 62 to 68 times sales, well above the 12.2 times sales the stock traded on the private market in 2019.
On the other hand, SpaceX’s annual revenue growth between 2018 and 2025 is about 33%. However, forecasts for 2026 (assuming they’re accurate) mean the company’s revenue growth is actually accelerating by more than 50%. This suggests that a higher valuation may be justified, although I must admit that “68x sales” may be a bit of an exaggeration.
Generally speaking, I value most space stocks at no more than four times sales. Granted, “most space stocks” are unprofitable compared with SpaceX, which says its earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization (EBITDA) are at least positive and has been “cash flow positive for many years.”
Again, this is a good argument that SpaceX is worth it Some A premium valuation. Still, my hunch is that when this IPO happens, its valuation will be very difficult to defend.
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SpaceX will IPO in 2026. How much is SpaceX stock worth? Originally posted by The Motley Fool