June 13, 2026 — 2:46am ,first published The $2.5 trillion space invasion coming to Wall Street “Not just a few astronauts, I mean literally you,” Musk said. “Whoever you are watching this, SpaceX wants to be able to take you to the moon, take you to Mars and ultimately beyond.” Known for his brilliant technology breakthroughs, as well as wild claims and missed deadlines, Musk was expected to break that trillion-dollar mark in the biggest initial public offering ever as investors place bets on a company with losses as big as its ambitions. Advertisement In addition to establishing a one-million person Martian colony, the company has promised to save humanity by establishing other outposts in space, launch data centres the size of football fields into orbit and outdo rivals Anthropic and OpenAI in the race to make money from artificial intelligence. To reach its goals, SpaceX needs billions more than it currently takes in from its rocket and satellite business. Between the start of 2025 and March 31, 2026, the company lost $US8.7 billion. A pedestrian wears a space suit during the SpaceX initial public offering (IPO) at the Nasdaq MarketSite in New York. Bloomberg Wall Street bankers that helped take SpaceX public are enthusiastic about the company – and the big fees they will earn – but not everyone thinks the stock price is justified. Analysts at research firm Morningstar, which doesn’t earn any investment banking fees, wrote that the IPO is “significantly overvalued” because of SpaceX’s unproven technology and massive capital needs. Advertisement They estimate the company is only worth $US780 billion – less than half its IPO value. Still, Musk has pulled off the seemingly impossible before. Musk made his fortune by creating two companies, Zip2 and PayPal, that netted him about $US200 million at sale. He used that money to start SpaceX and invest in Tesla, and defied the odds by creating a space company that figured out how to reuse rockets and a car company that made electric vehicles cool. SpaceX has made history with the biggest-ever IPO. Bloomberg Musk has realised vast sums of wealth for himself, much of it in stock he has yet to cash in or grants for shares he’ll only receive if Tesla or SpaceX hit ambitious performance targets. His recent pay package from Tesla drew criticism from the Vatican. At Tesla, he’s worried shareholders by fighting with regulators or dividing his attention between multiple companies and last year by taking a role in the Trump administration. Advertisement But a rising stock price has cured all ills: Since it went public in 2010, Tesla has returned 20,000% for shareholders, or more than $US1.2 trillion in investor wealth. That has helped lift Musk’s pre-SpaceX IPO worth to $US795 billion, according to Forbes magazine. SpaceX is the first of three “megacap” companies expected to go public this year, with Anthropic and OpenAI to follow. Nasdaq even revised its rules to allow SpaceX to gain entry into funds tied to its indexes in 15 days, which means investors will end up buying the rocket maker’s shares much earlier. Related Article