SpaceX IPO Could Make Musk First Trillionaire, Despite Mounting Losses

The great American fortunes of the past—the Rockefellers, the Mellons—built their dynasties across generations and would seem quaint by today's standards. The digital age has compressed that timeline into something almost unrecognizable. On June 12, SpaceX is expected to go public in what could be the largest initial public offering in history, a moment that would transform Elon Musk into something the world has never seen: the first trillionaire.

The numbers are staggering. Initial calculations suggest a market valuation around $2.2 trillion on the company's first trading day. Musk controls roughly 50 percent of SpaceX's shares, which means the offering could add somewhere between $625 billion and $1.1 trillion to his current fortune of $839 billion—already the largest on Earth, according to Forbes. The math is almost too large to parse. With a fortune approaching $2 trillion, Musk could fund the entire federal education budget of the United States for more than 25 years, or NASA's complete budget for nearly a century. It exceeds Spain's entire annual economic output.

Yet the financial picture beneath this valuation tells a different story. SpaceX generated $18.7 billion in revenue during 2025, up 33 percent from the year before. But the company lost $4.9 billion in that same period, a hemorrhage driven largely by massive investments in artificial intelligence. The bleeding has not stopped. In just the first three months of 2026, SpaceX lost $4.3 billion—nearly as much as the entire previous year. A company with these numbers in any other sector would struggle to justify a $1.25 trillion valuation, let alone the $2.2 trillion the market appears willing to assign.

The reason becomes clear when you examine where the money actually comes from. Of SpaceX's three divisions, only one is genuinely profitable: Starlink, the satellite internet service. It generated $11.4 billion in revenue last year, representing 61 percent of the company's total income. Starlink operates a constellation of thousands of satellites in low Earth orbit, delivering high-speed internet to rural and remote areas where traditional infrastructure does not reach or functions poorly. The other two divisions—the space business with its NASA and Department of Defense contracts, and the artificial intelligence division that includes the Grok chatbot—are both losing money. The narrative around Mars colonization and the potential monopoly that could emerge from such ambitions appears to weigh more heavily in investors' minds than the actual financial fundamentals.

Musk is not the only one who stands to benefit enormously. Gwynne Shotwell, SpaceX's president and chief operating officer, is the fifth-largest holder of Class A shares. Antonio Gracias, CEO of Valor Equity Partners and a board member, controls 7.3 percent of all Class A shares. Alphabet, Google's parent company, is among the largest external shareholders after investing $900 million in 2015 when SpaceX was valued at roughly $10 billion. Alphabet now controls approximately 6 percent of the company.

The timing of SpaceX's IPO carries its own drama. OpenAI, the artificial intelligence company behind ChatGPT and one of Musk's most bitter rivals, is rumored to be filing its own IPO documentation this week. Musk recently lost a lawsuit against OpenAI's CEO Sam Altman and president Greg Brockman, whom he had sued for allegedly betraying the original altruistic mission of artificial intelligence and transforming it into a profit-generating machine. The simultaneous timing of both offerings is no accident. Companies and their investment banks deliberately choose windows when markets are hitting record highs to maximize valuations at the moment of sale. The current market environment—despite inflation concerns and fears of a dotcom-style bubble—appears to be precisely the kind of window both SpaceX and OpenAI are racing to exploit.