By Harris Hakim
Space Exploration Technologies Corp. — better known as SpaceX — has finally pulled the trigger on its long‑anticipated Nasdaq IPO.
Elon Musk’s rocket and satellite empire has filed its Form S‑1 with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, setting the stage for one of the most closely watched listings in modern history. The shares will trade under the ticker “SPCX” on Nasdaq and the newly minted Nasdaq Texas, a symbolic nod to Musk’s Lone Star base.
But the SpaceX going public today is not the same company that dazzled us with Falcon 9 landings a decade ago. It has been remade by acquisitions, stitched together into a three‑segment conglomerate: rockets, satellite broadband, and artificial intelligence.
With the absorption of xAI’s Grok platform and the X social media network, SpaceX now calls itself “the infrastructure of the future.” It is a company that wants to launch not just payloads, but entire digital ecosystems.
The numbers are staggering. In 2025, the combined group generated US$18.7 billion in revenue and US$6.6 billion in adjusted EBITDA, though heavy investment left it nursing a US$2.6 billion operating loss.
Starlink, the connectivity arm, is the star performer: US$11.4 billion in revenue, up 50% year‑on‑year, as millions of subscribers signed on across 164 countries.
The space division, meanwhile, poured US$3 billion into Starship development — a rocket Musk insists will underpin humanity’s future among the stars.
And the AI division? Ambitious but costly, with US$3.2 billion in revenue against a US$6.4 billion operating loss, as billions were sunk into colossal data centre clusters.
Yet buried in the filing is the real moonshot: compute as a product. In May 2026, SpaceX signed a US$1.25 billion‑per‑month deal with Anthropic, giving the AI firm access to SpaceX’s COLOSSUS clusters.
It also struck an option agreement with Anysphere, operator of the Cursor coding tool, valuing the startup at US$60 billion. These aren’t side hustles — they are signals that SpaceX intends to sell compute power the way it sells launch slots.
And then comes the audacious vision: orbital AI. By 2028, SpaceX plans to deploy satellites that double as data centres, powered by solar arrays in Sun‑synchronous orbit. Imagine AI inference workloads running above the Earth, bathed in constant sunlight, free from terrestrial energy constraints. It is science fiction edging into prospectus reality.
The IPO itself carries Musk’s signature twist: a dual‑class structure that cements his control. Class A shares get one vote; Class B shares get 10. Musk holds the lion’s share of Class B, ensuring that even as SpaceX becomes a public company, it remains firmly under his command. Nasdaq rules will classify it as a “controlled company,” exempt from certain governance requirements.
Scale is already breathtaking. As of March 2026, SpaceX operated 9,600 Starlink satellites, serving 10.3 million subscribers. Across Grok and X, the AI platform counted 1.3 billion accounts, with 550 million monthly active users. The IPO proceeds will fuel more: bigger constellations, deeper AI infrastructure, and the relentless march of Starship.
No price range has yet been disclosed, but the message is clear. SpaceX is not just selling shares; it is selling a vision of rockets that lift humanity, satellites that connect it, and AI that might one day orbit above it. Musk has always promised to make the impossible possible. Now, with SPCX, he is inviting Wall Street to buy into that promise.
WE