The SpaceX IPO: Your Money, Musk's Kingdom
On Friday, it could become the largest IPO ever, and Elon Musk gets 85.1% of the voting power in the world's first sovereign company. Now we find out what it will truly cost.
A.I. Disclosure: I use LLM technology to help with research, fact-checking, document summaries, editing, and rewrites. I’m trying to use it responsibly, but I’m learning as I go. You can read my full ethics disclosure here.
On September 28, 2008, on Omelek Island in the Marshall Islands, the engine of a Falcon 1 rocket sat under the nervous gaze of hundreds of SpaceX engineers and, by extension, thousands of its investors. The first three attempts to ignite and launch the thing had failed — once when a fuel leak caused a fire at launch, once when a control system failed, once when an unexpected thrust surge backed the rocket violently into its own second stage. Rocket launches are the very definition of difficult, not to mention costly: the company had only enough money left for this attempt. Employees watched a live feed from the other side of the world, some of them crying during the countdown. And then…it lit. The Falcon 1 lifted off. And it burned cleanly for nine and a half minutes. For the first time in history, a private company’s liquid-fueled rocket left the grip of gravity and reached orbit.
The rockets did exactly what the company promised, delivering NASA’s payloads to orbit cheaply and reliably. (And even, to my utter amazement, returning to Earth upright for reuse.) But the real money came from another payload they carried. By the end of 2025, Starlink (SpaceX’s satellite internet constellation, delivered into orbit in stages until they ringed Earth) had grown to more than 9 million subscribers globally, generating the majority of SpaceX’s estimated $15.6 billion in annual revenue on a recurring, subscription-based model. The kind of economics that turn an impossibly expensive rocket company into a cash machine. A machine that in 2024 quietly turned a $791 million profit.
Then Musk looked at that machine and decided to use it to fund a war for AI dominance, one he was clearly losing.
In February 2026, SpaceX acquired xAI — Musk’s artificial intelligence company, maker of the Grok chatbot — in an all-stock deal. The acquisition brought xAI’s losses onto SpaceX’s consolidated books. Building, maintaining, and launching rockets is expensive. But in 2025 alone, xAI spent $12.7 billion in capital expenditures — more than the combined $8 billion SpaceX spent on its entire Starlink and rocket launch business. SpaceX posted a net loss of $4.94 billion for the year, a swing of more than $5 billion from the year before. The profitable company became the wallet for the unprofitable one. That’s what this week’s SpaceX IPO is asking the market to fund.
Before we get to whether this is a good bet, we need to be clear about what Musk is actually asking of you, his investors.
He wants your money. He does not want your opinion.
SpaceX is listing under a dual-class share structure. “Dual-class” means two tiers of stock. One class for outside investors, with standard voting rights. One class for Musk and insiders, with dramatically amplified voting power. According to SpaceX’s own S-1 filing, as reported by Reuters, Musk’s Class B super-voting shares give him 85.1% of the voting power of the entire company. You can buy a piece of SpaceX on Friday. You cannot tell SpaceX what to do. Ever.
Musk didn't invent this arrangement. When the New York Times and the Washington Post went public in 1967 and 1971 respectively, the Sulzberger and Graham families kept voting control through dual-class share structures, explicitly to protect editorial independence from market pressure. The argument was: trust us with your money, we'll protect the journalistic mission. But that was a narrow carve-out in a market that had largely rejected the practice since a Dodge Brothers stock scandal in 1926. What tech companies did was rehabilitate dual-class shares as a general business model, and the markets rewarded them for it. Google was the first tech giant to adopt the structure when it went public in 2004. Then Meta used one. Snap went all the way and offered public shareholders zero voting rights whatsoever. Investors piled aboard anyway. The stock prices went up. The model spread.
What sets SpaceX apart is its scale…and geopolitical impact. Google, Meta, and Snap trade in your data and attention. SpaceX’s customers include NASA, the U.S. Department of Defense, commercial satellite operators, and an increasing number of foreign governments. When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, Starlink became the communications backbone of a nation at war in ways no government had planned for and no competitor could replace. Musk held — and on at least one documented occasion, withheld — connectivity that determined the course of military operations. No shareholder vote required. No board approval sought.
Institutional Shareholder Services once described Facebook’s governance structure as having “a defense against everything except hubris.” Fidelity’s then-general counsel said companies adopting dual-class structures are “less likely to have alignment and less likely to have the accountability.” Those lines were written about companies that sell ads alongside your information diet. SpaceX sells rockets to the US government and internet access to armies.
