The number stopped being a rumor this weekend. SpaceX is pricing at $135 — and now there's an actual balance sheet underneath it. If you're just joining, SpaceX's path to the public markets has already moved past simple access scarcity. Reuters put the price at $135, and now the debate is whether that supports a roughly $1.75 trillion valuation. The supply overhang we're watching is staggered lockup expirations starting in July and August, including a big August 20th release and another tied to the first earnings report. This is SpaceX IPO Watch — and today the S-1 is finally live. Big spending, big losses, an AI line item nobody knows how to price — and the question of who actually gets to buy at that $135. Let's get into it. From I3investor:
NEW YORK (June 3): In a surprise move ahead of its investor roadshow, Elon Musk's SpaceX plans to fix its initial public offering (IPO) price at US$135 (RM536.69) per share to raise a record-setting US$75 billion, according to a source familiar with the matter. The rocket and satellite communications company plans to sell 555.6 million shares, the source said. It is aiming for a valuation of US$1.75 trillion, two other people said.
Reuters has it at $135 a share, 555.6 million shares, a $75 billion raise — and here's the part that should make every banker's eyebrow go up: it's a fixed price. Set before the roadshow. Which is wild, right? Nobody fixes the price ahead of bookbuilding. You set a range, you let demand push you to the top. SpaceX just walked in and said — this is the number. Or — read it the other way. You skip the range when you don't want investors discovering the price for you. A fixed $135 ahead of the roadshow says less about confidence, Eric, and more about control. Come on. A 24-year-old company sprinting to market doesn't fix the price because it's scared — it does it because it can. The demand's already there; the roadshow's a formality. $1.75 trillion on day one, ahead of OpenAI and Anthropic in the queue. That's the whole private-to-public IPO wave riding on this one print holding up. Morningstar, with Michael Bodley:
In the first quarter of 2026, SpaceX posted a net loss of $4.30 billion on $4.70 billion in revenue, up from a net loss of $528 million on $4.07 billion in revenue in the year-ago quarter, according to the filing. It also disclosed a debt load through the first quarter of $29.1 billion.
Okay, here it is — the actual document. Net loss of $4.9 billion on $18.7 billion in revenue last year, and the debate finally moves off the $135 price tag and into the filing math. And Starlink's revenue power is right there on paper now. $18.7 billion — that's the number I've been citing from memory all week, and now it's audited. Sure, but look at the first quarter. A $4.3 billion loss on $4.7 billion in revenue — versus a $528 million loss a year ago. We're way past rounding-error territory, Eric. The losses are going vertical. Because they're spending. $10.1 billion of capex in one quarter — and $7.72 billion of it tagged to artificial intelligence. That's exactly the line I want to dig into. Seven-point-seven billion in AI capex inside a rocket company's prospectus — how much is really a SpaceX cost, and how much is subsidizing xAI? Retail can't price that boundary, and now there's a number to test it against. Here's Lauren Grasch at Bloomberg:
As the gigantic space exploration startup barreled toward a public listing after 24 years as a private company, the urgency was apparent. The rush was driven by a canny strategy: go public before the US midterm elections, with a — mostly — pro-Musk president in charge; beat OpenAI and Anthropic to market to get in early on investors’ appetite for AI-focused listings; and become a public company before Musk’s 55th birthday at the end of June.
Bloomberg's got the inside story on the sprint — six months of Musk telling everyone faster, move faster. And I love the rationale: go public before the midterms with a friendly president, beat OpenAI and Anthropic to the AI listing window, all of it. Eric reads that as conviction. I read it as a countdown clock. You don't rush a 24-year-old private company through its first-ever public scrutiny because the fundamentals are screaming go now. Most of Bloomberg's reasons are calendar, not company. The midterms, competitor timing, and — I'm not kidding — Musk's 55th birthday at the end of June. When the deadline is a birthday, ask what got skipped to hit it. Okay, the birthday thing is funny. But the AI-listing timing is real strategy — you want to be the marquee AI-adjacent name before OpenAI floods the tape. The window matters. So SpaceX is reportedly pricing shares at $135 and talking about a $1.75 trillion valuation — but who actually gets to buy in at that price, and does a number set by insiders even mean what we think it means? Great question, because this isn't like logging into your brokerage and just buying Apple. That $135 is SpaceX's own suggested offering price in the IPO filing. It implies a roughly $1.75 trillion valuation — and, per reporting from the BBC and others, that would make it the largest IPO in history, targeting about $75 billion raised by selling around 556 million shares. But remember, SpaceX and its underwriting banks set that valuation before a single public share trades. Vaughn Cordle at Ionosphere Capital Research has flagged the conflict there: those banks profit directly from the forecasts they use to justify the price. For ordinary investors, there is reportedly a retail allocation, potentially as large as 30% of the offering through major trading platforms. But that's post-IPO access, meaning you're buying at or after the listed price — not in the pre-market rounds where earlier private investors got in much lower. And per Lighthouse Financial's analysis, even at $135, SpaceX would debut larger than Tesla by market cap, with only a fraction of its shares freely tradable on day one. If only a fraction of shares are actually trading freely on day one, what happens when insiders are eventually allowed to sell — does that price hold up? That's exactly the risk Cordle's analysis zeroes in on. He describes a staggered lockup structure designed to release insider supply gradually into market strength, and projects a possible 35 to 50 percent decline after those lockups expire. So the $135 IPO price is a real starting point. It's also controlled. The test is where the stock trades weeks and months later, once insiders are legally free to sell. If SpaceX IPO Watch helps you keep up, take a moment to subscribe and leave a review wherever you’re listening. It really helps other curious listeners find the show.
Next, we're watching SpaceX's first public earnings report — both for the financial disclosures themselves and for the lockup release tied to that report.
We’ve put links to every story from today’s briefing in the show notes, so if you want to dig deeper on any of it, start there. That’s SpaceX IPO Watch for today. This is a Lantern Podcast.