In today's FirstScroll, we unpack the biggest IPO in human history. A rocket company that actually lost money last year just went public at nearly $2 trillion. So what on earth is everyone paying for? Spoiler: it's not the rockets.
The Story
Quick gut check. When you hear "SpaceX", what pops into your head?
Rockets. Big shiny ones, landing themselves backwards on a drone ship in the ocean. Mars. Elon. That's the brand.
So here's something that'll mess with your head. The rockets are basically a side hustle.
On Friday, SpaceX went public on the Nasdaq under the ticker SPCX. It priced at $135 a share, valuing the company at about $1.77 trillion and raising $75 billion, the largest IPO in human history. That single raise is bigger than the GDP of most countries. And it made Elon Musk the world's first trillionaire.
Now here's the part nobody expects. In 2025, the year right before this record-smashing IPO, SpaceX actually lost $4.9 billion. Lost. With an L.
So pause and sit with the weirdness. A company that lost five billion dollars just got valued at nearly two trillion. That's like your friend who's broke this month somehow being told he's worth more than Apple. How does that math even work?
To get it, you have to throw out the rocket story and look at what's actually under the hood.
Plot twist #1: SpaceX is secretly an internet company.
You know Starlink? Those little satellite dishes that beam internet down from space to places where cables never reached, villages, ships, war zones, your favourite YouTuber's off-grid cabin?
That's the real business.
In 2025, SpaceX pulled in $18.7 billion in total revenue, up 33% in a year, and about 60% of that came from Starlink. The actual rocket-launching business, the thing the whole brand is built on, made up only about 22% of revenue.
Read that again. The rockets are the opening act. Starlink is the headliner.
And Starlink isn't just big, it's growing at a pace that's genuinely hard to believe. It had 2.3 million customers in 2023. That doubled to 4.4 million in 2024. Then doubled AGAIN to 8.9 million in 2025, hitting 10.3 million across 155 countries by March 2026. Doubling your customers two years in a row is the kind of thing investors throw money at.
So why does a "rocket company" lose money if its internet arm is printing cash? Glad you asked.
Plot twist #2: there's a money furnace bolted to the rocket.
In February 2026, SpaceX merged with xAI, Musk's artificial intelligence company, the one that makes the Grok chatbot. And AI is outrageously expensive to build. Training models needs giant data centres stuffed with chips that cost more than apartments.
How expensive? Of the roughly $21 billion SpaceX spent on capital last year, $12.7 billion went into building data centres for xAI. That's more than it spent on rockets AND satellites combined. And the AI division alone racked up a $6.35 billion operating loss in 2025.
So now the picture clicks into place. Starlink is the cash machine. xAI is the cash incinerator. And right now, Starlink's profits are basically being shovelled straight into xAI's furnace. As Morningstar put it, Starlink's success is effectively subsidising xAI's spending. That's why a company with a brilliant core business still posts a loss on paper.
Which brings us to the trillion-dollar question. If it's losing money, why is anyone paying $1.8 trillion?
Because the stock market doesn't buy what a company earned last year. It buys what it thinks the company will earn for decades. And investors are betting on three things at once.
One, Starlink eats the global telecom industry. One analyst flagged that Starlink is positioned to disrupt the $2.18 trillion telecom industry. If even a slice of the planet's phone-and-internet bills shifts to satellites, the numbers get silly. Cathie Wood's Ark Invest thinks Starlink alone could pull $300 billion a year by 2035.
Two, Starship. The giant next-gen rocket that, if reusability works at scale, slashes the cost of getting to orbit so dramatically it opens up businesses that don't even exist yet.
Three, the xAI bet. Today it's a furnace. The wager is that it becomes a serious rival to OpenAI and turns into a profit engine of its own.
Here's the catch though, and it's a big one. Even cheerleaders admit the price is bananas. The valuation works out to roughly 94 to 109 times the company's yearly revenue. For perspective, when Google went public it traded at about 10 times revenue while growing 240%. SpaceX is being priced far richer while growing far slower than Google was. Investors are paying today for a future they're trusting will arrive.
And there are real threats to that future. Amazon's rival "Leo" satellite service is coming, promising download speeds up to double Starlink's. Starlink's growth is also bottlenecked by SpaceX's own launch schedule, every satellite has to be flown up, so any rocket delay slows the cash machine.
One more thing worth knowing, because it explains a lot. After the IPO, Musk holds about 85% of the voting power, meaning he essentially can't be fired without his own permission. So when you buy SPCX, you're not really buying a vote. You're buying a ticket to ride whatever Musk decides to build next.
So, how did SpaceX become worth $1.8 trillion without selling a share for 24 years?
By quietly becoming something completely different from its own brand. Everyone was watching the rockets land. Meanwhile, the company built a satellite internet empire in the sky, strapped an AI moonshot to it, and then asked the public market to fund the whole bet at once.
The rockets got the attention. Starlink got the money. And investors? They're paying trillion-dollar prices for a story that hasn't fully happened yet.
Whether that's visionary or insane, well, that's the $1.8 trillion question.
Until next time...
