SpaceX Said to Pursue 2026 IPO, Raising Far Above $30 Billion

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00:00There's a lot that you and I have to cover on a potential SpaceX IPO, which we've reported

00:04is for the entirety of the business, right? Not just Starlink. But actually, important to start

00:10with, you would note that SpaceX is the private company that users of your platform are most

00:18interested in. In quantifying that for us, just transparently explain what Equity Zen's

00:25relationship to SpaceX's private market shares is. Sure. Thanks for having me, Ed. You hit

00:32the nail on the head. SpaceX is the most popularly requested private company on Equity Zen. It's

00:38been that way for probably our entire existence as a business over the last 13 years. And that

00:44really just means that there is retail exuberance about investing in SpaceX. The company is 23

00:50years old. It's older than a lot of my employees. It has garnered interest. It's had success.

00:56It's out in the public. People have done incredibly well with Tesla as public market investors. And

01:01so there's a lot of enthusiasm to invest in the company while it's private and what seems

01:05to be now an opportunity to invest in it while it's public and maybe even less than a year,

01:09which is pretty surprising. There is, of course, a lot that we don't

01:13know. What percentage of the company is SpaceX going to offer? What is the structure of the

01:18IPO going to be? But in reporting this story, Phil, one of the things I reflect on is that

01:24existing SpaceX shareholders aren't that diverse. You have Founders Fund, Fidelity, Google through

01:32Google Ventures and through CorpDev, 137 Ventures, and then like others in the world of venture capital

01:40and strategics. But my point is that quite a lot of the company is owned by quite a small group. And

01:44then there's the Elon Musk factor as well. How does that translate in an IPO environment for anyone

01:49that wanted to get into the company? Well, there's a couple other things to think about,

01:54which is that a 23-year-old company has had a lot of employees come, stay, leave, right? And so you

02:00have a wide swath of shareholders, kind of like a long tail of ownership. And so sure, there's some

02:05concentration in some of their biggest investors and in the founder's shares. But this thing is pretty

02:10widely held. I'd go so far as to say that an IPO might also be a solve for the fact that the company

02:16is a private entity and can only have 2,000 shareholders. That is a requirement before they

02:21have to start filing financials. That may actually be a bit of a driver here as well. But as far as

02:26what the IPO is going to look like, this is uncharted waters, right? Saudi Aramco, Alibaba, those would

02:33actually be smaller than these IPOs, right? And we don't know, or than this IPO. And we don't know if

02:37it's going to be primarily secondary liquidity to existing, if it's going to be new capital,

02:42though I would posit it's probably going to be new capital, based on a lot of your reporting as well,

02:46because there's going to need to be investment from SpaceX into new computing and processing power.

02:53So to a big portion of the Bloomberg tech audience that work in the world of technology,

02:57tenders and the secondary market is something they'll be familiar with. Loads of people will not

03:02be familiar with that. And so what usually happens with a big IPO is in late stage growth

03:07primary rounds, where the company raises money, issues new equity, you get these kind of anchor

03:12investors that come in ahead of an IPO. It might be a year in advance. In this case, what we're

03:18reporting is the tender is confirmed, $800 billion valuation, $421 share price. Could you explain that

03:25dynamic ahead of a big IPO, how there isn't any new primary round, not raising new money, which,

03:31as you know, Elon Musk has been at pains to point out on X? Sure. In its simplest form,

03:37if you're a business that's profitable, and you don't need new capital to continue growing,

03:42why dilute yourself by taking a new investment injection, you know, through a primary? A

03:48secondary liquidity offering is a way to reward employees or perhaps early investors by getting

03:54them liquidity for their shares without diluting ownership overall for everybody else. And this is

03:59something that SpaceX has elected to do over the past few years, I believe, kind of semi-annually,

04:04in a way to provide liquidity, not dilute themselves, also set a new kind of external price

04:10for their shares, but still maintaining an immense amount of control. And the only thing I would call

04:15out here, Ed, is that obviously $2 billion of liquidity is a big number, but it's actually only

04:200.25% of the valuation of this company. And so I hesitate to kind of identify that $800 billion is

04:28the new market price for SpaceX, more so that it is the market price that SpaceX has decided

04:32is out there. Yes. Yeah, the tender was capped at $2 billion. That's what I reported.

04:37We just have 30 seconds. Valuation at IPO, $1.5 trillion. What do you make of that?

04:45That, I think, would put it in uncharted waters, right? You've got three public companies that are

04:49worth north of $3 trillion. Where is the upside from $1.5? I'm not sure. At the same time,

04:54the bull in me says Palantir had a robust retail investor audience. It trades at north of 100 times

05:00revenue. So the art of the possible is somewhere in between those numbers. I do know that this would

05:04probably be literally the most exciting IPO we've ever seen.

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