SpaceX IPO Scandal

TL;DR

SpaceX's $1.75 trillion IPO is financially dubious, using a tiny share float, index-inclusion manipulation, and an inflated XAI merger to manufacture demand.

Key Points

• 1.- SpaceX targets a $1.75 trillion valuation — larger than Meta or Tesla — with an IPO reportedly targeting June 9th (6/9) partly due to a Jupiter-Venus-Mercury conjunction and Musk's numerology obsession
• 2.- The rush to IPO before rivals OpenAI and Anthropic is driven by a liquidity plateau in private markets, with XAI burning $1 billion per month and needing public capital
• 3.- Musk folded XAI into SpaceX at a $250 billion valuation despite XAI earning only $120 million in revenue over 9 months of 2025, effectively using SpaceX's rocket business as a bailout vehicle
• 4.- Grok holds just 3.4% AI market share versus ChatGPT and Gemini's combined 85%+, and six of XAI's original founders have left since the start of the year
• 5.- SpaceX is priced at ~94x its 2025 revenue; Facebook IPO'd at 11x and was considered expensive — Palantir currently holds the highest S&P 500 multiple at far lower levels
• 6.- The orbital data center pitch is engineering fiction: cooling a handful of AI chips in space requires radiator hardware rivaling the ISS, and a 1-gigawatt orbital system would need 4km-long solar arrays
• 7.- Starlink's realistic addressable market is ~32 million households globally who lack wired broadband and can afford $100+/month — not the 1.2 billion users Pitchbook's bull case assumes
• 8.- SpaceX plans to float only 5–10% of shares and has demanded fast-tracked inclusion in the NASDAQ 100 (after 15 days) and S&P 500, forcing $24 trillion in passive funds to buy at bubble prices — mirroring Tesla's 2020 inclusion after which Tesla underperformed the index by 20%