SpaceX Files for IPO as $5 Billion Loss Tests Trillion-Dollar Pitch on Starship

SpaceX filed for an initial public offering last Wednesday. Plans for a Mars colony and hundreds of gigawatts of data centers in orbit have drawn market attention. But the linchpin of the company’s future valuation is Starship, the next-generation super heavy-lift rocket standing on a launch pad in Texas.

Forbes reported on May 22 that SpaceX is generating $18 billion in revenue while posting a net loss of about $5 billion. Even so, the company’s main case to investors for a valuation in the trillions of dollars rests on Starship. SpaceX has already poured more than $15 billion into developing the rocket.

Starship is larger than the Saturn V rocket that carried Apollo astronauts to the moon and is designed to be fully reusable. SpaceX’s next-generation Starlink satellites are so large they can be launched only by Starship. The rocket is also central to all of the company’s broader plans, including orbital data centers and NASA’s crewed lunar missions.

The problem is that development is running years behind the original schedule. Several past test flights ended in explosions. Only recently did Starship successfully reach orbit. The latest delayed test flight is due to resume soon.

With its stock-market debut only weeks away, Starship’s upcoming test flights will face unusually intense market scrutiny. In the risk factors section of its prospectus, SpaceX wrote that any failure or delay in Starship development could delay or limit the company’s core growth strategies, including next-generation satellite deployment, global satellite mobile communications and orbital artificial intelligence computing.