SpaceX official confirms it is considering an IPO
In a message to employees on December 12, 2025, SpaceX’s chief financial officer, Bret Johnson, confirmed the company is considering issuing an initial public offering of stock sometime in 2026, but that nothing has been decided in any way.
His announcement also indicated the reason to do so would be to raise enough funds to “ramp Starship to an insane flight rate, deploy AI data centers in space, build Moonbase Alpha and send uncrewed and crewed missions to Mars.”
I think the question is whether the company is raising enough revenue from Starlink to do what it wants, or whether it now sees a need for more investment capital that it cannot get from either that revenue or private stock sales. If it finds in the coming months the former is sufficient, the stock sale will be put off, probably for several years. If it finds the latter, than we shall see this IPO sometime in 2026.
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The print edition can be purchased at Amazon or from any other book seller. If you want an autographed copy the price is $60 for the hardback and $45 for the paperback, plus $8 shipping for each. Go here for purchasing details. The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
In a message to employees on December 12, 2025, SpaceX’s chief financial officer, Bret Johnson, confirmed the company is considering issuing an initial public offering of stock sometime in 2026, but that nothing has been decided in any way.
His announcement also indicated the reason to do so would be to raise enough funds to “ramp Starship to an insane flight rate, deploy AI data centers in space, build Moonbase Alpha and send uncrewed and crewed missions to Mars.”
I think the question is whether the company is raising enough revenue from Starlink to do what it wants, or whether it now sees a need for more investment capital that it cannot get from either that revenue or private stock sales. If it finds in the coming months the former is sufficient, the stock sale will be put off, probably for several years. If it finds the latter, than we shall see this IPO sometime in 2026.
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The print edition can be purchased at Amazon or from any other book seller. If you want an autographed copy the price is $60 for the hardback and $45 for the paperback, plus $8 shipping for each. Go here for purchasing details. The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
As one that thinks that Starship was an unfortunate gamble*, I must wonder if the reach has exceeded the grasp. IPO funding might not have been necessary.
*I have mentioned in various places that a smaller precursor vehicle could have ironed out many of the operational issues of methane much faster and cheaper. Among other things, a 9+1 Raptor vehicle with Falcon type handling could have been in revenue service years ago. Double the falcon payload and work out the issues with stainless construction of methane vehicles while getting paid for it.
Silly idea. Scale is what makes Starship a viable concept.
Maybe Mike. Maybe not. Many of the problems to date are caused by going too big too fast with too little prior art available. I think they skipped a base and it’s biting them.
There’s an old joke about getting a bigger watermelon truck after just breaking even with a small one. Starship success is likely but not guaranteed.
To the strategy critics I would observe that the Starship/Superheavy investment is among the fast and most successful in history. Superheavy is already essentially operational and will be for sure by the end of 2026., so they already have the booster side worked out.
That leaves Starship which is admittedly a reach, but if all they want is a bit cheaper mass to orbit they could cut and run to a cheaper expendable design in a heartbeat if they wanted. It is Starship reuse that is the key to REALLY knocking down the $/Kg to orbit and after flightt 11 I think their progress on the heat shield is pretty damned impressive. And the torture test flight profiles they put 10 and 11 through speak very well to a level of robustness that you really need to entertain making these things MAN rated.
So for my money I think they are well on pace.
WRT pursuing an IPO I would venture a guess that some of the private investors are pushing for this to deliver some returns. Of course they like Starlink and the trajectory of Satellite to Cell business, but they don’t want to defer positive gains forever. I am sure they like Elon’s enthusiasm for Mars but suspect they view a lot of that as a poorer use of profits than they would prefer.
Starship/SuperHeavy are gaining Raptor flight experience and run hours at nearly four times the rate that a 9+1 smaller rocket would. As MDN says the booster is just about a done deal and an expendable upper stage is dead easy at this time. Tell us again about how this is a failure?
SpaceX is also exploring the edges of the envelope. Now and again it gets exceeded but this isn’t a failure, it establishes a boundary.
Mike Borgelt: The bottom line that it seems impossible to get people to understand is that Starship is presently in a development program, so that failures are certain to happen and are actually welcomed, in that they teach the “boundaries”, to use your term.
Moreover, this development program is proceeding with remarkable speed, far faster than anyone should expect. After only eleven test flights the booster — Superheavy– is practically operational, though still being refined. Considering what a monster it is, and how radical its design and concept, this progress is truly phenomenal, and should instill confidence in the program, not doubts.
As for Starship, it has already shown several times it can return to Earth intact, a remarkable achievement after only eleven flights. There is every expectation it will catch up to Superheavy quite soon.
John Hare,
Starship already represents a significant size retrenchment relative to the notional Interplanetary Transporter System concept of 2016 vintage. The decision to go stainless steel rather than carbon-fiber composite was also driven by the comparative economics of the materials as well as by the relative straightforwardness of dealing with stainless at the needed scale compared to the far more problematical carbon-fiber as well as stainless steel’s far superior heat resistance. The size of Starship was a matter of optimizing across all of its projected use cases and not just in succeeding F9 as an Earth-orbit payload launcher.
MDN,
Agree except about investor motives. SpaceX investors have gotten very nice returns based strictly on share value appreciation – far better than they could likely have gotten for any alternative investment over the same period. Any of them can avail themselves of SpaceX’s once-or-twice-a-year liquidity events should they choose to.
I think what is impelling this potential IPO is Elon’s calculation that he can steal a more extensive and decisive march on his AI competitors by getting this big wad of cash quite soon, rather than, say, more gradually over the next three years or so based on accumulated Starlink profits. It’s one of those time-value-of-money situations. By getting the earliest possible start at building out space-based AI data center capacity – both promptly, as piggy-back payloads on Starlink V3s and, longer-term, via lunar industrialization at Moon Base Alpha – I think Elon hopes to get, and keep, a long-term lead over all other AI competitors both foreign and domestic.
The IPO is being timed for roughly mid-year 2026 because that is when Elon thinks Starship will have reached initial operational capability anent Starlink V3 deployments – including, likely, the first version of the AI data center piggy-back payload – as well as having demonstrated on-orbit cryo prop transfer between Starships at scale. Having both of these boxes checked prior to the IPO will increase the value of the shares and reduce the number of said shares that will need to be sold to raise the target pile of cash.
Despite potential issues with inter-satellite data transmission latency, I think the Starlink piggy-back payload idea is a similar time-value calculation. Less-than-optimal, but sizable, AI data center capacity available on-orbit soon will put the Musk-iverse companies ahead of their AI competitors who are facing years-long delays building out comparable capability on the ground. Elon is, literally, the only person on Earth who can go this particular route at scale in short order because he has SpaceX and Starlink. Sam Altman at OpenAI apparently agrees, hence his recent, seemingly unsuccessful, run at buying Stoke Space.
As a life-long space nerd, I’m just grateful to finally see massive industrialization of the Moon now virtually certain to become a thing. In-space AI data centers will be the foundational product impelling this push, but other significant applications will quickly materialize and proliferate as well. A real cis-lunar economy is on the brink of realization.
Dick
Interesting points but I’m a bit skeptical of your AI Piggyback idea as a very viable path to large scale revenue. My logic is that a GW datacenter has a million processors and Starlink at best will have 30,000 to 40,000 satellites. So let’s say the match that with 40K piggy backs at 25 processors each. That is 25KW of extra power and cooling needed for each satellite which is possible, but decidedly non trivial. In addition this “datacenter” will have garbage comm latencies across the entire constellation and driving those comms is even more power. Finally space based computing is subject to lots of radiation induced single event upset (SEU) errors which you can design to deal with, but not easily, and today’s existing platforms are not well engineered for this.
WRT Starship being stainless steel vs carbon fiber I think folks are missing a very key consideration from Elon’s Moon Base and Mars Colonization perspective. And this is that stainless steel is a structural commodity that can be easily cut up and repurposed to build out all manner of infrastructure. This makes each ship about 60-80 tons of raw material for such projects over and above their payload and in the vacuum on the Moon or in Mars’ atmosphere you weld stainless steel up easy peasy. Carbon fiber structures have essentially no comparable Raw Material utility like this.
MDN,
The piggyback idea is Elon’s, not mine. All of the problems with it you adduce are real, but none is beyond the laws of physics and algorithmics to address. SpaceX, in any case, has long experience with keeping electronics working in hi-rad environments. Every Starlink sat, for example, is the equivalent of a high-end IP router. I would say that those “existing platforms” are quite well-engineered.
Your point about the comparative ease of repurposing stainless steel mass compared to carbon-fiber composite is a good one. But I think the switch-to-stainless decision was based on a lot of other factors, the most important being the comparative ease of building high-quality stainless spacecraft structure compared to the alternative.
A member of my own family was employed for several years in the making of small products out of carbon-fiber composite. There are just a lot of ways that process can go wrong even with something small enough to hold in one’s hand. Gi-normous rockets? Elon definitely dodged a bullet there.
I did not realize that Google/alphabet, and Fidelity investments have significant investment in SpaceX
Alphabet Inc. is set to record another large paper gain after SpaceX completed a new internal stock sale that sharply increased the private company’s valuation. The transaction values SpaceX at roughly $800 billion, marking one of the highest valuations ever reached by a privately held firm.
According to reports, SpaceX sold shares to insiders at $421 each. The price represents a significant rise from earlier internal transactions and directly affects the value of Alphabet’s long-standing investment in the rocket and satellite company founded by Elon Musk.
Alphabet has held a stake in SpaceX since at least 2015. That year, Google partnered with Fidelity Investments to invest $1 billion in the company. The deal gave the two investors a combined ownership of about 10 per cent. Since then, SpaceX’s repeated valuation increases have quietly boosted the value of Alphabet’s balance sheet.
https://enterprisewired.com/alphabet-inc/