The biggest public offering ever is financial nihilism's final form. That's how one analyst described the SpaceX IPO, which promises to make Elon Musk the world's first trillionaire while exposing millions of retail and passive investors to staggering risks. The filing reveals a company that has stapled a failing AI business to a successful satellite internet operator, all while carrying nearly $30 billion in debt and offering investors almost no governance protections.

The Cult of a Trillionaire

Elon Musk is the original financial influencer. His electric car company, Tesla, trades at more than 300 times earnings, while Ford and Toyota languish at about 11 times. Even Nvidia, a company printing money, trades at 33 times. Tesla is a meme stock, and SpaceX is poised to be the next one. The IPO reserves 30 percent of shares for retail investors—the very crowd that drove GameStop and AMC to absurd heights. But this time, the stakes are higher. SpaceX’s valuation exceeds $1 trillion, despite $5 billion in losses last year. Its total addressable market is listed as $28.5 trillion—more than the entire GDP of the United States. This is absurd nonsense, but it might not matter because the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent.

SpaceX: An AI Company?

The filing is peppered with references to the Moon, Mars, and “and beyond,” but the numbers tell a different story. By SpaceX’s own admission, $26.5 trillion of its $28.5 trillion TAM comes from AI applications. That’s despite the AI arm—which now includes X (formerly Twitter) and xAI—losing $6 billion in operations last year on revenue of just $3.2 billion. Meanwhile, Anthropic, an AI competitor, is on track to turn a quarterly profit. The AI unit generated only $818 million in revenue in the first quarter of 2026—less than Twitter alone made in Q1 2022 before Musk bought it. The filing also reveals that SpaceX spent $13 billion on AI buildout in 2025, yet its key AI product, Grok, is described as “distilled from” frontier models and is under investigation for producing nonconsensual sexualized images. The timing of the IPO filing coincides with Musk losing his lawsuit against Sam Altman, which exposed his lack of AI expertise. Greg Brockman and Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI cofounders, noted in 2018 that Musk “really hasn’t done his homework on AI/AGI.” That still appears true today.

The Rocket That Isn’t Ready

The entire space-based vision hinges on Starship, which has so far been prone to unexpected explosions. The filing claims Starship V3 is “designed to deliver 100 metric tons to space in a fully reusable configuration,” but it has barely carried more than the Falcon 9. The IPO document avoids disclosing actual Starship performance, instead using phrases like “we expect to commence deploying.” After the filing, a Starship test flight deployed only 20 dummy satellites—far short of the 60 V3 satellites needed. The V3 satellites weigh 2,000kg each; 60 would weigh 120 metric tons, exceeding Starship’s claimed capacity by 20 percent. This is classic Musk math. Revenue from launch services actually decreased by more than a quarter in early 2026, as the biggest customer for SpaceX rockets turned out to be SpaceX itself. The fantasy of point-to-point Earth travel, asteroid mining, and space tourism remains exactly that: fantasy.

Starlink: The Only Real Business

There is one viable business in this IPO: Starlink, the satellite internet provider. It brought in more than $11 billion in revenue last year and has a significant lead on competitors. Starlink has proven itself to enterprise customers and is the cashflow machine that will fund Musk’s failed AI dreams and Starship’s delays. However, the filing reveals that revenue per subscriber declined by about 25 percent due to heavy discounting, raising questions about retention. And while Starlink’s low-orbit satellites are functionally self-cleaning, the IPO document omits any cost of deorbiting. Meanwhile, SpaceX has stapled its AI ambitions onto Starlink by promoting data centers in space—a futuristic concept that faces enormous hurdles: launch and repair costs, difficulty of cooling, solar flare risks, slower data transfer, and the fact that Earth-based facilities will always be more advanced. Yet the filing claims that “the Sun contains approximately 99.8% of the solar system’s energy” four times, as if repetition makes the fantasy real.

The Debt Trap

Let’s talk about what is real: nearly $30 billion in debt. SpaceX refinanced with a $20 billion bridge loan due in September 2027, but it took a $1 billion prepayment penalty to do so. The first $20 billion raised from the IPO must go to repay this debt. The company also technically defaulted on a $1.5 billion credit facility by acquiring xAI because of the AI subsidiary’s debt load. Related-party transactions are equally alarming. Board member Antonio Gracias’s Valor Equity Partners has three lease deals with SpaceX subsidiaries worth $20 billion, structured as “failed sale leasebacks” that auditors refused to keep off the balance sheet. That adds another $9 billion in debt. One corporate governance expert called this the worst related-party deal she’d seen in 40 years. And Musk controls 80 percent of voting rights, so shareholders have no real say. Arbitration clauses limit litigation rights, and the SEC under the current administration is toothless. Early inclusion in the Nasdaq 100, thanks to a rule change, means index funds will be forced to buy $7 billion worth of SpaceX shares in a single day—trapping passive investors.

This is the final form of financial nihilism. The largest IPO ever means the biggest flop ever is possible, and Musk has positioned himself for a government bailout if things go wrong. The people who will suffer are not the early insiders but ordinary people whose retirement accounts will be stuffed with this stock. That’s the real spreading of the light of consciousness.

Source: The Verge News