SpaceX plans to raise up to 75 billion dollars (£56bn) when it goes public this month, setting the stage for the largest US stock market debut and putting Elon Musk on course to becoming the world’s first trillionaire.
The company, formally known as Space Exploration Technologies Corp, said it will sell 555.6 million shares at 135 dollars apiece.
The offering would give SpaceX a market value of 1.77 trillion dollars. Only six companies in the S&P 500 are currently worth more, with Nvidia tops at 5.2 trillion.
Besides the size of the offering and the expected proceeds, SpaceX’s amended prospectus updates details about how much control of the company Mr Musk will have.
As SpaceX’s CEO, chief technical officer and chairman, his voting power will come primarily through his ownership of 5.22 billion Class B shares, which give the holder 10 votes for every share held. According to the filing, Musk would have 82.4% of the voting power in the company.
Forbes currently values Mr Musk’s net worth at 826 billion dollars and his stake in SpaceX at 542 billion.
The estimated proceeds from the SpaceX IPO would easily top the 26 billion raised by oil giant Saudi Aramco in 2019.
Time will tell how SpaceX fares on the market. Mr Musk’s plans for the company are as fantastical as the money he hopes raise in the sale.
The IPO document strikes a contrast with the typically dry, technical prose in normal documents, detailing plans to use proceeds from the sale to help put men on the moon again and perhaps even Mars.
In one section, it talks of a need to build “a permanent human colony” on the red planet with “at least one million inhabitants” as existential threats loom that could consign man to “the same fate as the dinosaurs”.
Earlier this week, Anthropic submitted a confidential filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission to officially start its own IPO clock.
OpenAI has not yet reported filing the initial SEC paperwork but an IPO from the ChatGPT maker is widely expected.
