The potentially record-breaking IPO is likely, among other effects, to create a fresh cohort of wealthy individuals at SpaceX who have equity in the business.

The rocket maker SpaceX has filed publicly what is being billed as the largest-ever initial public offering, an event that could produce the world’s largest liquidity event of the kind that wealth managers will closely track. 

This week, SpaceX filed its IPO with the Securities and Exchange Commission. 

One feature of the share float is that Elon Musk, the rocket company’s founder, would keep a super-voting share allowing him to control the business.

The float could mint a large number of multi-millionaires. A report by Bloomberg said that in the Brownsville area of Texas, home to the space enterprise giant, it could create millionaires among some of the firm's 3,000 employees.

There is speculation over how to value SpaceX’s shares in light of financial disclosures that seem minuscule by comparison. SpaceX had a net loss of $4.28 billion on revenue of $4.69 billion for the first quarter, widening from a net loss of $528 million on revenue of about $4 billion a year earlier, the filing shows.

The listing is reportedly targeted to raise as much as $75 billion.

Other prominent IPOs of recent years include Saudi Aramco; Alibaba, Agricultural Bank of China, Meta Platforms, Bank of China, Uber Technologies, Life Insurance Corp of India, Rivian Automotive, NTT Mobile, and Porsche (source: Wall Street Journal). The world’s largest firm by market cap is Nvidia, which floated on the stock market in 1999.

IPO excitement

Wealth managers have commented on the significance of the SpaceX IPO and what it means for sectors including AI.

“We are mindful that a sharp acceleration in IPO activity often marks the peak of investor bullishness and of market levels, preceding a market fall – examples include the SPAC (Special Purpose Acquisition Company) IPO boom in 2021 and the dotcom boom of the late 1990s which peaked in March 2020, in both cases involving companies promising high growth rates but with limited track records of profitability and cash generation," Sanjiv Tumkur, head of equities at Rathbones, the UK wealth manager, said in a note.

“There has been much talk of an ‘AI bubble’ given the huge amounts of capital being invested in AI data centres and the so far limited financial return on this investment.

"It appears to us that the advent of AI agents – autonomous AI-driven systems that independently plan workflows, use external tools, make decisions and execute actions – such as Anthropic’s Claude significantly increases the likelihood that AI will be deeply and rapidly embedded into most businesses and that this will help the AI hyperscalers and large language model providers ultimately achieve meaningful revenues and profits. This does not however rule out the risk that in the short term expectations could become overextended,” he added.