Washington (United States) (AFP) – SpaceX, the rockets-to-AI behemoth led by Elon Musk, aims to raise $75 billion in the biggest initial share sale ever, as the world’s richest person pursues data centers in space and a trip to Mars. SpaceX said in a regulatory filing Wednesday that it would offer exactly 555,555,555 shares — Musk has shown a penchant for idiosyncratic numbers in his businesses — at $135 each. That would value the company at a whopping $1.8 trillion.
Analysts say Musk is aiming to capitalize on investor enthusiasm for his satellite internet plans as well as artificial intelligence, after he folded his xAI and its Grok chatbot into SpaceX earlier this year. His plan is to use SpaceX’s rockets to launch solar-powered, satellite-based data centers to develop and run future AI models. And last month, SpaceX announced plans to invest $55 billion to build a “Terafab” semiconductor factory in Texas, producing chips for artificial intelligence as well as robotics. “The AI trade continues to roar, just in time for SpaceX’s IPO next week,” said Kathleen Brooks, research director at the brokerage firm XTB in London.
The sale could also make Musk, already the world’s richest man, the world’s first trillionaire. Analysts expect further consolidation of Musk’s business empire in 2027, when SpaceX, already the owner of X (formerly Twitter), is likely to merge with his electric car company Tesla, which is increasingly focused on robotics, energy, and autonomous transportation. In 2020, SpaceX activated its StarLink broadband operations, shaking up the satellite internet business with fast and relatively affordable access. It now has around 10.3 million subscribers across 164 markets, the company says. Among the many users have been Ukrainian troops battling against Russia’s invasion, and Iranian anti-government protesters. That business has proven to be a key source of cash for the capital-intensive company, which reported a loss of $4.9 billion on revenues of nearly $19 billion last year.
“On any normal metric the numbers defy belief” for justifying the potential valuation set by Musk, noted Michael Hewson, senior market analyst at iForex. “Any investor will be basically betting on the success or otherwise of not only its Starship launch program, but also Elon Musk’s ability to deliver on the orbital data centre part of the business, as a stepping stone to the Moon and Mars,” he said in a research note. However, “betting against Elon Musk in the past hasn’t exactly proved to be a successful endeavour,” he added.
While SpaceX was not directly involved in NASA’s Artemis II program, which carried out a historic flyby of the Moon in April, it will play a key role in the Artemis program’s future. More than fifty years after first landing humans on the Moon, NASA hopes that SpaceX will help them do it again in 2028, and Musk’s company is designing a lunar lander for the mission. While the timeline could shift, NASA has said it hopes to test an in-orbit rendezvous between its spacecraft and one or two lunar landers in 2027, with a view towards a lunar landing the following year.
The company speaks openly about its ambitions to put humans on Mars and has even tied a massive bonus for Musk to colonizing the red planet with one million inhabitants. Musk describes his Martian ambitions as key to the long-term survival of the human race.
Until the SpaceX shares actually trade on public markets, the only people who can buy shares directly are large financial players like banks and pension funds — or very wealthy individuals. By the time the public is able to purchase them, many of the gains — the kind that have made millionaires and billionaires of early tech investors — may be history. The extraordinary valuation is widely seen as reflecting less the reality of SpaceX’s current businesses than faith that Musk will deliver on his promises that the company will reach Mars and put data centers into space. Despite SpaceX’s public listing, Musk is expected to retain control of the company with over 80 percent of the voting power, allowing him to “control the outcome of matters requiring shareholder approval,” according to the filing on Wednesday.
SpaceX was founded in 2002 and has since broken new ground for private space flight. In 2012, a year after NASA retired its Space Shuttle, SpaceX docked a private spacecraft with the International Space Station (ISS) for the first time. It has since made regular successful cargo delivery missions. But for most of the 2010s, NASA relied on the Russian space program to ferry astronauts to and from the ISS. That changed in 2020, when SpaceX became the first private space company to take humans to the orbiting lab, restoring the ability for the United States to make the journey independently. Its highly produced livestreams of rocket launches have drawn large viewership across social media and attracted crowds to launch sites across the United States.
© 2024 AFP
