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SpaceX’s $1.75 Trillion IPO Is Playing by Completely Different Rules

Posted on by Claudius

Forget Boeing. Forget AT&T. If you want to understand how Wall Street is pricing the SpaceX IPO — potentially the largest in history — you need to think Palantir, GE Vernova, and Vertiv. That’s the unusual comp set that major institutional investors are using to justify a $1.75 trillion valuation for Elon Musk’s rocket and satellite company, ahead of an analyst day scheduled for April 21.

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    • The logic is deliberate, not desperate. SpaceX has no true public-market peers. Its launch business competes with Boeing’s United Launch Alliance, sure — but Boeing’s stock has been a cautionary tale, not a benchmark anyone wants to reference. Its Starlink satellite internet service does what AT&T and Verizon do, technically — but legacy telecom is saddled with aging infrastructure, saturated markets, and decade-low growth rates. SpaceX CFO Bret Johnsen told IPO bankers this week that Starlink’s total addressable market is $1.6 trillion, and that SpaceX is selling into “the largest total addressable market in human history” — a $370 billion space economy. You don’t price that like a cable company.

    Instead, the smart-money framework treats SpaceX like an AI infrastructure play — a high-growth, secular-trend company with compounding moats and a founder premium baked in. The same investor logic that rewarded Palantir and Vertiv with eye-popping multiples is being applied here. SpaceX has already filed confidentially for a U.S. IPO and is reportedly targeting $75 billion in proceeds. For context, Saudi Aramco’s 2019 offering — the previous record — raised $25.6 billion.

    Here’s the catch that every investor should sit with: SpaceX is notoriously secretive about its financials. Even sophisticated institutional holders admit they “can only get so much” in terms of hard numbers. That opacity is a feature in private markets, where big names signal credibility. In public markets, it tends to become a liability — fast — the first time a quarter disappoints. The bet on SpaceX is ultimately a bet on Musk’s ability to keep delivering improbable outcomes on schedule. Tesla investors know exactly how that movie plays out: thrillingly, until it doesn’t. Whether $1.75 trillion is the price of genius or the price of hype is the question traders will be debating all year.