Why SpaceX Could Be the Riskiest and Most Exciting - IPO in the World /By Longtunman
The biggest news in the global investment world right now is undoubtedly SpaceX. Elon Musk's rocket and satellite company is preparing for an IPO on the U.S. stock market.
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The company aims to raise up to $75 billion at a valuation exceeding $2 trillion, which would make it the largest IPO in history.
When many people hear the name SpaceX, they think of rockets that can land themselves like in a sci-fi movie, or satellites beamed to provide internet across the globe.
But the story behind the scenes is far more fascinating than just a rocket or satellite business.
It involves a trillion-baht AI deal, a governance structure where retail investors have virtually no voice, and financial figures that raise quite a few eyebrows.
How intriguing is this backstory?
Longtunman will break it down for you.
When speaking of SpaceX, the image everyone visualizes is a rocket blasting off and then flying back to land itself vertically.
Nearly a decade ago, nobody believed this was possible. Yet, SpaceX pulled it off.
This achievement has instilled immense confidence in the company. However, in the world of investing, confidence alone is not enough.
Let's dive deep into the financial figures.
SpaceX’s business is divided into three main segments:
- Space (Rockets and space transportation)
- Connectivity (Starlink satellite internet)
- AI (Which bundles xAI, Grok, and X, formerly Twitter, together)
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In 2025, total revenue stood at $18.67 billion, a 33.2% growth from the previous year.
That sounds great, but if we dig deeper, we begin to see something interesting.
The first thing to know is that Starlink, not the rocket business, is the true heart of SpaceX today.
Connectivity, or the Starlink business, generated $11.39 billion in 2025, growing 49.8% year-over-year. This accounted for 61% of the entire company’s revenue, boasting an EBITDA margin of around 63%.
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Meanwhile, Launch Services—the commercial rocket launch business—brought in just $2.58 billion, showing virtually flat growth compared to $2.58 billion in 2024.
This stagnant growth dragged down the overall Space segment, which accounts for 22% of total revenue and grew by a mere 7.6% from the previous year.
This means that future revenue growth for the Space segment relies heavily on Starship.
Starship is the primary vehicle designed to transport humans and cargo to colonize Mars, fulfilling Elon Musk's ultimate goal.
To date, SpaceX has conducted 11 Starship test flights, with a 12th flight scheduled to debut the next-generation spacecraft and Super Heavy booster.
The Starship V3 spacecraft is designed to deliver a 100-ton payload to orbit in a fully reusable configuration. The company expects to begin launching payloads into orbit in the second half of 2026.
These payload missions will deploy Starlink V3 satellites, Mobile V2 satellites, and early-stage orbital AI processing systems, which can generate revenue immediately once operational.
Consequently, this will trigger a massive unlocking of the space economy in the future.
Simply put, the SpaceX going public today is selling a grand vision for its Space business.
At this point, many might think it looks promising—Starlink is growing rapidly with high margins, making it a definitive investment.
However, Starlink's ARPU (Average Revenue Per User per month) is steadily declining.
In 2023, it was $99 per month. In 2024, it dropped to $91 per month. In 2025, it fell further to $81 per month.
And in the latest first quarter of 2026, it sat at just $66 per month.
SpaceX anticipates that ARPU will continue to decline for several more years. This means Starlink subscribers are paying less and less each year.
Why is this happening?
The primary reason is that Starlink is expanding its customer base outside of North America into regions with lower purchasing power, necessitating cheaper plan offerings.
Furthermore, customers in developed markets are migrating to lower-tier plans, and the company has also slashed prices for its residential internet packages.
SpaceX argues that this is acceptable because subscriber volume is growing rapidly—surging from 2.3 million in 2023 to 10.3 million in Q1 2026—and the manufacturing cost of next-generation satellites has dropped by more than 59% per unit compared to older models.
The business model therefore relies on subscriber volume growth and cost reduction, rather than increasing the price per head.
On one hand, that logic is sound, but it also means investors must believe that SpaceX can continually acquire new subscribers for years to come and that costs will decrease as promised. Both factors require close monitoring.
Now, let's look at the most exciting part.
SpaceX revealed that in May 2026, it signed a contract with Anthropic, the AI company behind Claude, to lease compute power from SpaceX for $1.25 billion per month until May 2029.
Calculated over the entire lease term, the contract is worth approximately $45 billion, or around 1.5 trillion baht.
This figure is so massive it requires a double-take. This contract is the first clear signal that SpaceX is emerging as a major Cloud AI provider, not unlike Amazon's AWS or Microsoft's Azure.
But before getting too carried away, a vital observation must be addressed.
This contract can be terminated by either party with just a 90-day notice. Furthermore, the contract details—such as electricity costs, GPU depreciation costs, or actual utilization rates—have not been disclosed. Therefore, the actual profitability of this deal remains unknown.
The third issue is the incredibly heavy Capital Expenditure (CapEx) in AI.
In 2025, SpaceX spent a total of $20.74 billion in CapEx. Of that amount, $12.73 billion—or 61% of total capital expenditure—was poured exclusively into the AI business.
In the first quarter of 2026 alone, the company already spent $7.72 billion, which annualizes to approximately $30 billion.
Because of this aggressive investment, SpaceX recorded a net loss of $4.94 billion in 2025, a sharp reversal from the $791 million profit achieved in 2024.
Part of this loss also stems from SpaceX retroactively consolidating xAI and X (Twitter) into its financial statements in February 2026.
By now, many might wonder: what does the shareholding structure look like?
It is vital to understand that SpaceX has two classes of shares: Class A shares, which carry 1 vote per share and will be the shares traded on the public market, and Class B shares, which carry 10 votes per share and are held by Elon Musk. In total, Elon Musk controls 85.1% of the company's voting power ahead of the IPO.
Additionally, Class B shareholders hold the right to elect the majority of the board of directors.
This means that if you buy SpaceX stock after the IPO, you will have virtually no voting power in major company decisions.
While this structure is perfectly legal—and utilized by many U.S. tech giants like Alphabet (Google) or Meta—
It ultimately means investors are betting entirely on the long-term vision and decision-making of Elon Musk alone.
Given that Elon Musk concurrently runs Tesla, SpaceX, Neuralink, and The Boring Company,
The "key man risk" here is significantly higher than in most other corporations.
In conclusion, SpaceX today is a company with three faces sharing one body.
The first face is the Starlink business, which is generating real cash, but its ARPU is declining every year.
The second face is its world-famous rocket business, but its revenue is barely growing.
The third face is the AI business, which requires astronomical investments and boasts an exciting deal with Anthropic, yet has plunged the company into heavy losses with an unpredictable future.
Investors looking to buy SpaceX stock must ask themselves how strongly they believe in these three propositions:
Believing that Starlink can continuously find new customers despite falling ARPU.
Believing that Starship will succeed, colonize another planet, and pioneer a new era for a space economy with infinite value.
And believing that Elon Musk can actually translate massive AI investments into monumental profits.
It is fair to say that SpaceX represents one of the grandest bets on the future in stock market history.
This is because SpaceX is selling the belief that a single individual, Elon Musk, can fundamentally change the world across three different fronts simultaneously.
And that is precisely the greatest strength—and the greatest risk—of this IPO at the very same time.
Disclaimer: This article is not intended to provide investment advice to buy or sell any securities. All figures mentioned are sourced from the preliminary S-1 Filing, and final details are subject to change. Investing involves risk; please thoroughly review all information before making any investment decisions.