SpaceX lost $4.9 billion last year. Elon Musk holds 85% of the voting power, and he’ll be awarded more shares if the company successfully colonizes Mars.
Those are just a few of the revelations from the SpaceX S-1 prospectus, the first financial look under the hood of the rocket company, which also owns the social media platform X and xAI, before it goes public next month.
Pricing is yet to come, but it’s expected to be the biggest initial public offering in history. At least until the next mega-IPO, OpenAI, which is reportedly aiming to go public in the fall. Anthropic is expected to follow.
When the web browser Netscape went public in 1995, it was barely a year old. Wall Street went bonkers. That kicked off the dot-com boom.
“There were lots of startups that went public … at a very early stage, where it wasn't at all clear who the survivors were going to be,” said Jay Ritter, an economist at the University of Florida.
That created risk for retail investors, but also opportunity to get in on the ground floor of tech companies that would build unimaginable fortunes, like Google and Amazon.
“In the last few decades, they’ve been delaying going public,” Ritter said.
SpaceX is 24 years old, OpenAI is 10, Anthropic is only 5, but all have mature businesses generating billions in revenue.
It means gains have accrued to a smaller number of private investors and venture capital firms. And that important details about these companies’ business models have been less transparent.
“Once you go public, companies can no longer cherry pick what kind of what pieces of information they want to disclose,” said Minmo Gahng, a professor of finance at Cornell University.
