This analysis was first published in SvD Näringsliv, in Swedish, on June 12th, 2026. This piece was translated from Swedish by Claude. Some phrasing may differ from a human translation.
SpaceX became world-leading by launching rockets. But now that the company has gone public, it’s something entirely different driving the valuation. That gives a clue as to what Elon Musk is actually building.
In the space industry, you get used to launches. Now the world was waiting for the opposite.
In October 2024, in southern Texas at the site now called Starbase, SpaceX accomplished something no one had done before: landing the part of the rocket that had just been launched.
That’s how SpaceX made their name. Enormous technical skill and extraordinary ambitions. But Friday’s stock market listing is, strangely, not about this. And things are likely to get stranger – now that the next phase of SpaceX begins.
Musk’s corporate portfolio has been tidying itself up for some time. In a long series of unusual deals, he has merged his empire, piece by piece.
A clear business logic for all the acquisitions is hard to see from the outside. They seem to have an entirely different motive: Musk wants to consolidate his power in one place.
In October 2022 he bought Twitter, which was subsequently sold to his AI company xAI in March 2025. These two companies then ended up under SpaceX, right in the middle of preparations for the IPO. Together, the banks – with Musk’s cooperation – were able to arrive at a valuation of $1.8 trillion.
How do you justify that? Well, there isn’t much to compare it to. How many other space companies are planning to build colonies on Mars while also selling AI services via data centers in space?
SpaceX is a unique asset. With a uniquely high price tag.
Reading SpaceX’s IPO prospectus, it becomes clear what a transformation the company has undergone in a short time. The part most people associate with them – the space business – is considered the smallest of the markets they are targeting. That market is worth $370 billion. Next come the telecom services via Starlink, the satellite network providing internet to hard-to-reach parts of the world. That market is considered roughly twice as large as the space segment.
Largest of all is the market for AI applications for businesses. SpaceX estimates that to be worth $22.7 trillion – roughly 32 times Sweden’s GDP. But so far, the AI business hasn’t delivered even a fraction of that.
Whether SpaceX’s AI bet will reach its full potential over time is for each person to judge. But given the scale of the operation, it has done something unfortunate: it has reduced the extraordinary achievements in the space business to a side note.
The company’s enormous valuation is based primarily on the potential of AI. Musk has gathered almost all his businesses into one company, and has now successfully taken it public. But it is no longer purely a space company – it is a jumble of Musk’s various interests. Through a kind of alchemy that almost only he can manage, he has pushed up the valuation while keeping control intact.
SpaceX has become a conglomerate for Musk’s own mind and ambitions.
I wrote that Musk has gathered almost all his companies, because for now there is still one major exception: Tesla.
There is strong reason to believe it is only a matter of time before that too is merged with SpaceX into one single giant company.
The companies are already connected in many ways, beyond Musk as their majority shareholder. Tesla is mentioned, for example, 80 times in the SpaceX prospectus. There is both cross-ownership and customer relationships between them. It would be a complex deal under normal circumstances – but it is control of the shares that is decisive. And that control belongs to Musk.
SpaceX’s IPO could have been a milestone and the starting gun for the next generation of space companies. In some ways it still is – the company’s achievements are intact regardless of what happens around them.
But it is hard to escape the fact that Musk’s power ambitions have weighed more heavily than what would have been best for SpaceX as a company. Why would a company that launches rockets and satellites want to own a social network? Or sell AI services?
Engineering has been pushed aside in favor of world domination – and the inflated valuations tied to an AI future. What made SpaceX unique has been set aside in favor of a consolidation of power.
The focus for SpaceX’s next phase will, unfortunately, probably not be about space.
