Yuval Avidani
Author
In my eyes this is one of the most fascinating IPOs we've seen, and not just because of the numbers. SpaceX, Elon Musk's company that sends rockets into space, is going public in the biggest offering in history, and underneath all the hype there's a much more intriguing story about AI computing in orbit around Earth. I checked the details, and let's break this down together, slowly, from zero, without assuming we already know what a "ticker" is or what a "retail investor" means.
Before anything, one note that matters to me: this article is a factual, neutral explainer only. This is not investment advice and not financial guidance: I'm explaining what's happening, not telling anyone what to do with their money.
Wait, what even is an "IPO"?
Turns out a lot of people get confused by these terms, so let's start from the foundation. When a company wants to raise a lot of money to grow, it has the option to sell small pieces of itself to the public. Each piece like this is called a share. Think of it like a giant pizza cut into millions of slices, and everyone who buys a slice becomes a tiny owner of the pizza.
The next step is an IPO (Initial Public Offering): the moment when a private company sells slices like this to the general public for the first time. Up until that moment, only a small group of owners held the company. After the IPO, anyone can buy in.
And in a tidy definition: an IPO is a process where a private company offers its shares for sale to the general public for the first time, for investors who want to become small partners in the company.
And where does all this selling happen? Inside a stock exchange, an organized market where people buy and sell shares. The specific exchange here is called NASDAQ, an American exchange where a lot of the world's biggest tech companies trade. Think of it like a huge, regulated market, except instead of vegetables, what's being sold there is ownership of companies.
So that every share can be identified quickly, the company gets a ticker, a short abbreviation of a few letters that represents it in trading. SpaceX's ticker will be SPCX. That way, instead of writing out the full name every time, you just type four letters.
The numbers behind this IPO
Now that we have the vocabulary, let's see why everyone's talking about this. SpaceX filed a confidential application with the American SEC (the body that oversees the market) back in April. "Confidential" means it started the process behind the scenes before everything was revealed to the public.
The numbers themselves are insane: the company is planning to raise about $75 billion, through the sale of 555.6 million shares at $135 per share. This is the biggest IPO in history: no company has ever raised this much money at once.
The generous part: an open door for "retail investors"
Here's a detail that caught my eye. In the world of IPOs there's a concept called a retail investor, which is simply a regular private person like me and like you, buying shares out of their own pocket, as opposed to "institutional investors" like banks, pension funds, and giant entities that manage billions.
Usually, when a big, sought-after company goes public, most of the juicy chunk goes to those big institutions. Retail investors are usually left with just crumbs, around 5 to 10 percent of the shares. And in this case? Musk is allocating up to 30 percent of the shares to retail investors. That's three to six times the usual amount, an unusually generous move aimed at the general public, not just Wall Street.
In my eyes, beyond the sentiment, there's also a calculation here: Musk built a massive fan base, and letting these people become real owners in the company is both a move of loyalty and PR. A different approach than the norm, not necessarily better, just different.
So what does SpaceX actually do, and where does the money come from?
Here it's important to distinguish between what the company does and what the company earns from, and that's not the same thing.
What it does is two main things. First: rocket launches: it builds and launches rockets named Falcon and Starship, both for customers like NASA and for itself. Second: Starlink: an array of thousands of small satellites that circle Earth and provide fast internet even to remote places without infrastructure. This service already has about 10.3 million subscribers.
And now the fun part: most of the money actually comes from Starlink, not from the rockets. Out of revenues of $18.67 billion in 2025, Starlink's share (the Connectivity segment) was about $11.4 billion, meaning roughly 61 percent. Starlink is the only profitable part of the company: satellite internet is what keeps the business afloat financially, not the flashy rockets. There's even a new service called Starlink Mobile that provides internet directly to a smartphone, no dish needed.
And this is where Grok comes in: the most fascinating twist
So far we've been telling the story of a space company. But in February 2026 something happened that changes the whole angle: SpaceX acquired xAI, the company behind the chatbot Grok, a ChatGPT competitor. The deal valued the combined company at $1.25 trillion (SpaceX alone at a trillion, and xAI at $250 billion).
And for those keeping track: xAI itself had already swallowed up X, formerly known as Twitter, back in 2025. So now, under one roof, sit rockets, satellite internet, a social network, and artificial intelligence. In May 2026 xAI ceased to exist as a separate company, and Grok and X officially became SpaceX's AI division.
The obvious question is "why?". And here Musk's answer is surprising. According to him, the main reason for the merger isn't the chatbot at all. The real goal is to build orbital data centers: AI computing infrastructure, first on Earth and later actually in space.
Why in space? Because data centers, those giant warehouses full of servers that run AI, consume massive amounts of electricity and heat up a lot. In space there's sun without interruption for energy, and immense cold that helps with cooling. Think of it like moving the hottest server room in the world into the biggest freezer in the universe, with a solar panel that never turns off.
And what about Grok itself? Musk described it as a side project that's even losing money. The real prize in Musk's eyes isn't the chatbot, it's the ability to deliver cheap AI computing at massive scale. Grok is just a demonstration of what can run on this infrastructure.
Bottom line: what I'm taking from this
In my eyes, the story here isn't "a rocket company goes public." The story is Musk's attempt to unify launch, global connectivity, and AI computing into one continuous piece of infrastructure, from the ground all the way to space. That's ambitious, and it's also risky: a lot of this vision is still just a plan, and not everything will happen. Data centers in space is a lovely idea on paper, but the road from there to reality is long and full of engineering and financial obstacles.
And I'll repeat what I opened with, because it matters: all the numbers and facts here are a description of what's being published, not a call to buy or sell anything. The financial decisions belong to each and every one of you, ideally with independent research and professional advice.
So after we've broken all of this down, what do you think is really driving this IPO: space, the internet, or actually the race for cheap AI computing?