After the Tesla success, Elon Musk is back. Now he’s taking his rocket company – which today contains more AI than rockets – to the stock market with an astronomical valuation. Can it become another market phenomenon?
When entrepreneur Adam Neumann was preparing to take his co-working company WeWork public in 2019, he had a challenge. How do you make an office hotel sound more exciting than it is?
Neumann decided that the company’s “mission is to elevate the world’s consciousness.” That didn’t quite work. When the world saw the company’s numbers, a backlash began that led to its collapse. And when you read the prospectus for Elon Musk’s rocket company SpaceX, it’s impossible not to think back to WeWork’s fate.
The rocket company’s mission includes, among other things, to “extend the light of consciousness to the stars.” On top of that, a bonus will be paid out if the company manages to build a colony on Mars with at least one million inhabitants.
It sounds a bit like a fever dream. But then again – if there’s anyone who can sell this dream, it’s Elon Musk. He’s done it before, with Tesla’s electric cars.
In many ways, SpaceX has the opposite problem from WeWork. It’s hard to think of anything more exciting than a rocket company. But when you look more closely at the business, you realize that space itself has become an increasingly small part of it.
This is most visible in the section of the prospectus meant to describe the size of the market. In a clearly laid-out bar chart, you find “Space-enabled solutions” – meaning the actual space business. It is the smallest of all categories, valued at $370 billion. Next comes Starlink, which uses satellites to deliver broadband. That market is considered worth more than twice as much.
Those figures are barely visible compared to the “Enterprise applications” category, which appears to cover all software used by all companies everywhere in the world. In this category, SpaceX can offer AI services, through the acquisition of Musk’s company xAI. In total, that market is considered worth $22.7 trillion.
SpaceX is therefore claiming that its total addressable market is roughly the size of the entire US GDP for 2025.
What is called SpaceX is no longer just about rockets and satellites. It is now a company that also encompasses AI development. And that is somewhere around where the IPO finds its logic.
It will take a great deal of money in the years ahead.
The AI business – and the rockets too, for that matter – is losing enormous amounts of money. And it will only get worse. Capital expenditures – fixed assets such as hardware – are running so far this year at roughly seven times higher for AI than for rockets. In the first three months of the year, SpaceX lost more than $4 billion, slightly less than its total loss for all of 2025. The losses are accelerating sharply, apparently to keep pace in the AI race.
All of that might be something you could live with. Elon Musk has done the impossible before. Those who invested early in Tesla have had life-changing returns. Here comes a new company from the same man, and you as a small investor will have the chance to get on board. The list of enthusiastic Tesla shareholders is long – and so is the list of those who regret having missed Tesla’s run.
Needing a lot of money to invest in the future is not, in principle, an obstacle to listing a company. On the contrary, it is often the very purpose of an IPO.
But then we get to the valuation. The exact price won’t be set until just before trading begins, but the signal is clear. The intention is for this to be the world’s largest IPO ever. Talk is that the valuation will be at least $1.75 trillion, possibly as high as $2 trillion.
Sticking to the lower end, SpaceX’s intended valuation sits at roughly 94 times revenue. By comparison, Apple and Microsoft trade at around 10 times, and Nvidia at 21 times. Tesla, which is known for trading far above its automotive peers, is at 15 times.
The valuation is, as you can see, on an entirely different planet. And the reason for that appears to be Musk, AI, and some projected colony on Mars.
If there is any sanity left in the world, SpaceX’s IPO could mark a turning point for this phase of the explosive AI economy. OpenAI and Anthropic are both said to be heading toward their own listings at a rapid pace, while interest in AI remains at record levels. But at some point the market – and perhaps people in general – will say that enough is enough. This is too bubbly, too expensive. We can’t keep going like this.
But any such sanity does not appear to be on the horizon.
Not on this planet – or any other that SpaceX might one day visit.
This analysis was first published in SvD Näringsliv, in Swedish, on May 23rd, 2026. This piece was translated from Swedish by Claude. Some phrasing may differ from a human translation.
