The largest IPO in history will spark excitement on the stock markets, but behind SpaceX stands a massive bet involving the entire American strategy
So as not to be blasphemous, you’ll notice that in the world of capitalist economics — where the market is sometimes treated almost like a religion — a grandiose IPO (initial public offering) is experienced as a prophecy and a confirmation of dogma. A “happy moment,” euphoric — a hulking company that, by its very existence, is supposed to be confirmation of modern private-sector efficiency (which in this case is questionable in every respect) — finally goes public, and everyone can take part, can be a part of that joy and success. Such a story is conveniently offered to everyone, but behind it entirely different realities pile up.
Roughly such a spectacle awaits us in a few days, specifically on June 12. We are, of course, talking about Elon Musk’s company SpaceX. This stock-market debut now offers rockets, satellites, artificial intelligence, and American geopolitical hope in a single package. But behind the largest IPO in history lurks a question that transcends both Musk and Wall Street: Who will pay the price if the new space euphoria turns into a bubble?
The Largest IPO in History and the Price of the Future
On the stock market what is most often sold is a share, but sometimes much more than that — what is sold is the feeling that you are entering history before others. That is the dream of every IPO preparation, preparation that takes years.
Through the initial public offering, Elon Musk’s company is trying to raise around $75 billion. That number sounds enormous at first, but on its own it doesn’t yet tell us how much the market actually values SpaceX. The key is this second number: approximately $1.75 trillion. That is the rough value of the entire company that is implicitly “acknowledged” if the shares sell at the planned price. In other words, SpaceX is not selling its whole empire. It is selling only a smaller piece, and in doing so it sets a public market price for the entire empire.
Let us clarify.
If $75 billion is compared with the valuation of $1.75 trillion, it turns out that the IPO is offering roughly 4 to 5% of the company’s total value. That is a small share, but enough to produce a huge market effect. By selling a relatively narrow package of shares, SpaceX can raise more capital than many states are capable of raising through serious budget reforms — while the existing owners and Musk’s management structure retain almost complete control over the company.
In this lies an important part of the whole story that deserves special emphasis — an IPO is not merely a way for a company to raise money. An IPO is also a public ritual of determining value. Namely, if investors accept the price at which SpaceX is valued at $1.75 trillion, then that valuation becomes a reference point for all future discussions about the company — for employee shares, for existing investors, for future sales, for borrowing, but also for the political weight and place of SpaceX in the American strategic narrative (because big space business and the survival of America are now entering into symbiosis).
So one could say that the IPO is, in a way, a “testing of an assumption.” A small, though very expensive, part of the company is offered to the market. If investors strongly embrace it, the company gains an argument that its valuation is not merely the presentational ambition of investment banks, but a market-confirmed price. If demand is considerably greater than supply (and it will be), an even more favorable message appears for SpaceX: perhaps even $1.75 trillion is too low a price for what investors think they are buying. According to available reports, investor demand has already reached around $150 billion. That means investors are currently showing interest in roughly twice as many shares as are being offered. With smaller “hot IPOs,” such a ratio might not sound spectacular, but with an offering of this size, double the demand means something different. Here the market is not merely showing a desire for the share, but a readiness to participate in “creating the price” for one of the key companies of America’s future. The real prices? That remains to be seen. Put even more simply: if someone sells 4% of a house for $75 billion, the market thereby accepts the claim that the whole house is worth around $1.75 trillion. SpaceX’s IPO does exactly this. It does not sell the whole house. It sells a small window through which a price is assigned to the entire edifice. That is precisely why this offering has such great power. A small stake can become a mechanism for an enormous public valuation (the process of estimating the “fair market value” of a business, asset, or project), while real control remains in the hands of the founder and existing owners.
And yes, it is fascinating that even such a small part of the company, around 4%, already constitutes the largest IPO in history in itself. The previous record-holder was the Saudi oil state giant Saudi Aramco, which in 2019, by selling 1.5% of the company, initially raised $25.6 billion, with the company’s valuation at the time at around $1.7 trillion. Later, after the activation of an additional option to sell shares, the total value of Aramco’s IPO grew to around $29.4 billion. SpaceX is now trying to raise around $75 billion — that is, more than double Aramco’s expanded record. The difference here is as politically interesting as it is financially enormous. Aramco brought to the market a small piece of the Saudi oil empire, a symbol of old energy power. SpaceX is bringing to market a small piece of the American orbital empire, a symbol of new strategic infrastructure. One record belonged to oil. The other to space. America is excited, and in this it sees the continuity of its global — indeed, extra-global — dominance.
SpaceX is not a “pump and dump” (a swindle aimed at quick profit) scheme; the company brings to the stock market real rockets, satellites, and real contracts. But it also brings something even more attractive to the market than current earnings. It brings the promise that it will control the infrastructure of the future — launches, satellite internet, military communication, data, artificial intelligence, and perhaps part of the computing infrastructure above the Earth.
This is the reason SpaceX’s IPO cannot be reduced to the usual market euphoria. It is the financial “packaging of the future.” Here the market is not merely buying a company, but the right to participate in the privatization of a new layer of — as is claimed — civilizational infrastructure.
A Real Rocket and a Financial Fantasy Can Fly Together
We must acknowledge what is obvious. The company has achieved what traditional state programs and the old military-industrial suppliers often did more slowly, more expensively, and more sluggishly. SpaceX dramatically changed the economics of launches, developed reusable rockets, and created Starlink, a satellite internet network that already has global strategic importance.
SpaceX is definitely not a “pump and dump,” nor a paper company without a product. Their presence in orbit is visible to the naked eye in the night sky. Furthermore, their importance (or problematic nature, depending on how one looks at it) in communication networks is visible in wars, crises, and remote areas where conventional infrastructure does not exist or does not function. At the same time, it must be remembered that the company was built jointly by Musk and enormous American state subsidies, which shows that this is, after all, not a “pure capitalist fairy tale” — and most often they aren’t. Thus, a great deal of the “socialist model” is built into SpaceX itself, but, of course, only in the economic sense. On the state side, the idea of American military and technological survival is built in — not only survival, but also the continuation of dominance. SpaceX is bound to this from the start. Musk knows this too, but he will wisely keep silent about some details, or emphasize them, as needed — for example, when it comes to SpaceX’s influence on the Gulf or Ukrainian front (from drone navigation to AI, satellite information, and the like).
SpaceX is real, hulking, aimed at the future — but precisely for that reason the possible “bubble” becomes more dangerous. The biggest financial bubbles do not form around empty fabrications. They form around real technological breakthroughs to which the market then ascribes a euphoric and almost infinite future.
The dot-com era was one such example. The internet, clearly, really did change the world. Yet many internet stocks nonetheless destroyed and burned through capital. The railways in the 19th century also changed the economy, space, and industry. But speculative waves, bankruptcies, and crashes arose around them as well. The lesson repeats itself — the reality of a technology, even technologies that will define the future, does not protect the investor from the madness of price.
The emergence of artificial intelligence will, without a doubt, define the future of humanity — that scenario is already locked in — but that does not mean that all of the big companies putting it on the market today will necessarily collapse under the pressure of expectations.
SpaceX, for its part, is an ideal object of financial mythology. It is real enough that critics can be accused of “not understanding the future.” It is futuristic enough that almost any valuation sounds even “not ambitious enough” (this IPO will demonstrate exactly that). All of this together is ideal for creating an enormous modern technological bubble.
Because a valuation of approximately $1.75 trillion means that the market is already today pricing in a whole series of future “victories.” This is a price that assumes SpaceX will retain a dominant position in launches, expand Starlink, open new markets, withstand regulatory pressures, control capital costs, and turn the vision of space-based artificial intelligence into a viable business model. And the competition? And China? It isn’t even mentioned (we will mention it, a little later in the text), so as not to spoil the IPO celebration.
Each of these assumptions may make sense, but the sum of all these assumptions raises a question that financial euphoria most prefers to skip over. How much “future” may be built into the present price before the investment becomes “faith”?
AI in Orbit and the New Religion of Valuation
The most interesting part of SpaceX’s story isn’t just the rockets. The rockets have become the ticket of entry into a much larger narrative. The company is selling investors a picture of a market in which space turns into a platform for artificial intelligence, data centers, and computing capacity above the Earth.
Capital imagines orbit as a space without politics, without unions, without environmental permits, and without local resistance.
That story sounds almost perfect for our times. Artificial intelligence demands an enormous amount of electrical energy, chips, cooling, and space. American infrastructure is finding it ever harder to keep up with the hunger of data centers.
Working on Earth is becoming problematic. Permits take a long time, energy grids are buckling under pressure, local communities increasingly raise questions about water, electricity, ecology…
In that story, space appears as an elegant, graceful exit from earthly limitations.
Solar energy without night… Orbital infrastructure without local laws and regulations. Data centers without neighbors who protest over water and electricity consumption. Capital imagines orbit as a space without politics, without unions, without environmental permits, and without local resistance.
That is what the financial religion looks like. Every real technical problem is turned into a potential market (“find a problem, find a solution, get rich”). Furthermore, every potential market is turned into a presentation, and then every presentation into a valuation. The investor is then offered the opportunity to pay the present price for a future that does not yet have any stable shape at all.
Space-based data centers can be a serious technological topic; that importance should not be downplayed. Data processing in orbit already makes sense in satellite systems, Earth observation, and military applications. But enormous orbital computing capacities for artificial intelligence carry entirely different problems. For example, launching equipment, maintenance, replacing components, communication delays, security, malfunctions, and the cost of capital are not details — they are the modern gears without which the machine does not run.
The market, however, often behaves as if the gears come later. The narrative always comes first.
Capitalism has literally subordinated everything to its purpose — literally everything we find around us (housing, attention, parenthood, religion, life, death, everything). Now it treats orbit as the next layer of accumulation.
China Builds Factories, America Sells Orbit
The geopolitical backdrop gives the whole story even greater weight. For decades, the US relocated much of its material production beyond its borders. It retained only the dollar, Wall Street, software, the largest tech companies, and military supremacy. In the same period, China built up production depth, industrial chains, ports, batteries, solar panels, shipbuilding — and also an ever more ambitious space program.
That division shapes our era. China has factories. America has financial markets, a military-technological complex, and companies that promise control over the highest layers of infrastructure. SpaceX fits perfectly into that model. It is a private firm that grows on state contracts, military importance, technological dominance, and the market myth about its founder.
China’s SpaceX Rivals
China does not have a single “SpaceX of its own,” but it has an entire space ecosystem in which state companies, locally backed technological projects, and a new generation of private launch firms overlap. This is an important difference between the American and Chinese models. In the US, enormous symbolic and market weight is concentrated around one private company and one founder. China is building several parallel capacities that together are meant to achieve a similar strategic effect.
The most visible Chinese answer to Starlink is Qianfan, also known as Thousand Sails or the Spacesail Constellation. Behind the project stands the Shanghai-based SpaceSail structure. It is a megaconstellation of low-orbit satellites that is supposed to enable satellite internet and create a Chinese alternative to Starlink. According to available plans, Qianfan should in the long term have more than 15,000 satellites, while the number of launched satellites is rapidly increasing from month to month.
Alongside Qianfan there is also Guowang, or SatNet, a state-directed project for a national satellite internet network. If Qianfan is the most visible Chinese answer to Starlink in the commercial sense, Guowang is its strategic state shadow. It is planned as an enormous network of several thousand satellites that would give China its own global communications layer in low orbit. In a world where satellite internet increasingly also means military resilience, control of data, and communications autonomy, such networks are not merely technological projects — they are also infrastructure of sovereignty.
In the area of rockets and launches, China’s closest rival to SpaceX is LandSpace. This private company is developing Zhuque-3, a reusable rocket that is often compared to the Falcon 9. LandSpace has not yet reached the level of reliability and launch frequency that SpaceX has after years of experience, but it shows the direction of Chinese ambition. China knows that megaconstellations like Qianfan and Guowang require cheap, frequent, and reliable access to orbit. Without reusable rockets, there is no mass satellite internet at a price that can compete with Starlink.
The US, through SpaceX, is trying to show that it can still produce something complex and strategically irreplaceable.
The American answer to the Chinese industrial state takes a specific form here. The state — in this case the American one — grants contracts, accelerates permits, and defines space as a domain of national security. The private company develops the technology and retains ownership. Wall Street turns the future monopoly into a present-day price. This is the political economy of the American model in its purest form.
The Skeptics Come From the Very Heart of the System
Skepticism toward SpaceX’s IPO does not come only from circles that criticize Musk. Indeed, the circles whose reach is “I don’t like Musk” often don’t even have a solid argument to offer — yet the arguments very much exist.
The Danish AkademikerPension (an academics’ pension fund) has already placed SpaceX on its exclusion list. This is an important signal, because a pension fund has a different task than a hedge fund. A hedge fund can chase a short-term jump in price. A pension fund manages the deferred wages* of people who expect security in old age. When an institution like that warns about valuation and corporate governance, it is not merely “resistance to Musk” — it is a warning about the relationship between risk and price.
*Of course, we mean pensions! The political-economic term “deferred wages” is there to emphasize that a pension is neither a state’s act of mercy nor a fund’s gift, but a portion of the value of labor that was not immediately spent as current wages, but instead redirected into future consumption. This is something many forget — most often the retirees themselves!
Clearly, the concentration of power around Elon Musk cannot be ignored. If one man retains dominant voting rights while simultaneously holding key management functions, public investors are buying only a minority participation in a structure in which they have (very) limited ability to oversee it. The stock market then presents itself as a democratization of ownership, while real control remains closed off.
Aswath Damodaran, a finance professor at NYU Stern and one of the best-known experts on valuation, is likewise an important element of this story. His assessment of SpaceX’s value is lower than the targeted IPO valuation, particularly because of caution toward the enormous market assumptions tied to artificial intelligence.
Morningstar (a center for independent investment research) went even further and valued SpaceX at around “only” $780 billion, which is less than half the targeted IPO valuation.
Especially interesting is the warning related to index funds, because here the story leaves the world of professional investors and enters (also) the pensions of ordinary people. An index, put most simply, is a list of stocks that together represent a certain part of the market. The best-known American example is the S&P 500, an index that tracks 500 large American companies. When it is said that “the market rose,” what is often actually meant is that one of these indices rose. An index fund is a fund that does not try to cleverly pick individual stocks (important to repeat and emphasize once more). It simply tracks the index. So if Apple is part of the index, the fund buys Apple. If Microsoft is part of the index, the fund buys Microsoft. If some new company enters the index, the fund literally has to buy it in order to keep faithfully tracking that index. Put simply — if someone “enters the 500,” they get bought. This is so-called passive investing. It is popular because it is cheap, simple, and often more successful over the long term than expensive fund managers who try to beat the market. The problem arises when a very expensive — and very euphoric — company enters a large index. Then it is no longer bought only by investors who have voluntarily concluded that the price is reasonable. It is also bought by funds that must follow the rules. In other words, they can’t suddenly invent some S&P 499 if they fear that SpaceX is a bubble! So their decision in that case does not stem from an assessment that the stock is cheap, safe, or a wise purchase, but simply from the very methodology of the index. The stock becomes a mandatory item in the portfolio. For an ordinary saver, this means something very concrete. A person may have pension savings, an investment fund, or an account that automatically invests in a broad American index. He may never have decided to buy SpaceX. He may never have read the IPO prospectus. He may not be interested in Musk, space, or Starlink at all. But if SpaceX enters a large index, part of his savings can easily end up in that stock because the fund follows the rules of the index.
This opens up a question that is much broader than SpaceX. Who writes the rules of the index? Who decides when a new megacompany becomes “important” enough to enter the portfolios of millions of people? Who bears the risk if the price turns out to be inflated? Financial markets love to talk about free choice, but passive investing often turns choice into an automatic mechanism.
In this lies the hidden political economy of index funds. On the surface, they look neutral and technical. Buy the whole market, don’t try to be smarter than everyone, let time work for you. In practice, someone still decides what “the market” is. Someone determines the rules of entry into and exit from the index. Someone decides whether a new technological star will become a mandatory component of pension savings.
If SpaceX enters such a mechanism at an extremely high price, the risk spreads far beyond the circle of people who consciously wanted to participate in the space bet. The stock then is no longer merely an object of enthusiasm, greed, or geopolitical optimism — it becomes part of the financial infrastructure of everyday life. This is the moment when stock-market euphoria turns into a broader social risk as well.
Pension Money as Fuel for the Space Bet
The deepest risk of SpaceX’s IPO does not lie only in the price of the stock. It lies in the question of whose money is used to keep that price up.
Let us briefly clarify pension funds. Pension funds do not manage abstract capital. They manage “deferred wages.” A portion of today’s labor is turned into financial assets with the promise that tomorrow it will pay the rent, medicines, food, and a dignified old age. When that money is poured into mega-offerings full of euphoria, the risk shifts from professional speculators to people who often have no idea what is in their portfolios. This is also the class dimension of the story. If SpaceX succeeds, big capital, early investors, and the founding power structure will reap exceptional gains. If the price collapses, the loss can spill out through the funds, indices, and savings accounts of ordinary people. In other words — the gains are concentrated, the risks are spread. Or even more simply — if the thing succeeds, the rich will become much richer; if it fails, the poor will bear the burden. Scandalous? But that’s how it is, that’s how mature financialization works. First the future is turned into a story. Then the story is turned into a valuation, the valuation goes into the index, and in the end the worker discovers that his pension money has already taken part in the risk.
The American Pension Fused With the Stock Market
In America, the pension system is strongly tied to the S&P 500, but most often indirectly, through 401(k) plans (the name comes from Section 401(k) of the American tax code), IRA accounts, index funds, and target-date funds (a pension fund adjusted to the expected year of retirement). Not every American pension is automatically in the S&P 500, but that index is one of the main gravitational points of American pension savings. The most important channel, which you have surely heard of, is the 401(k), a private pension account that many workers have through their employer. The worker sets aside part of their wage, the employer often adds its own contribution, and the money is invested in funds offered within the plan. Those funds very often include American equity funds, S&P 500 index funds, broader “total market” funds, or target-date funds that themselves again have strong exposure to American stocks. According to the Investment Company Institute, at the end of 2025, 401(k) plans held around $10.2 trillion in assets, and mutual funds managed around $5.8 trillion, or 57% of the assets in 401(k) plans. Of that, equity funds held around $3.4 trillion, which shows how deeply American pension savings are tied to the stock market.
SpaceX here becomes a symbol of a broader order. Capitalism no longer seeks only new markets on Earth. Housing has been financialized. Healthcare is a market. Education is debt. Attention is a commodity. Data is a raw material. The next frontier lies above the atmosphere.
SpaceX may indeed be opening a new epoch of access to space. The American state may, through SpaceX, gain a strategic advantage in its rivalry with China. All of these claims can stand at the same time as one other claim — the price may be too high.
The stock market loves moments in which the future seems inevitable. Such moments create the greatest narratives and the most expensive mistakes. SpaceX’s IPO should therefore be viewed as a technological event, a geopolitical bet, and a test of the social distribution of risk.
The rockets head toward orbit, but the balance sheet stays on Earth. And the bill, as so many times before, may end up with those who weren’t even invited to the launch.
About the Author
Mario Hoffmann is an independent analyst and writer covering global economics, geopolitics, and international affairs. With a background in history and politics, he writes for EconoPuls to provide in-depth context on the stories shaping our world.
