The SpaceX IPO... It's Worse Than You Think
419 segments
Elon Musk is preparing the largest
initial public offering in human
history. At a $1.75 trillion target
valuation, SpaceX would be worth more
than every American defense contractor
combined. Worth more than the market
caps of Coca-Cola, McDonald's, Disney,
Nike, and Starbucks all put together.
And worth more than the top 10 companies
on the London Stock Exchange combined.
So, if you're wondering who the is
buying SpaceX, a company losing $5
billion per year at the largest IPO
valuation in history, well, the answer
is you. Because within a few weeks, your
retirement account is going to be one of
the biggest buyers of SpaceX stock,
whether you like it or not. And that's
because Nasdaq quietly introduced a
brand new rule designed specifically to
make that happen. But before we get to
the rule, you need to understand why
this all matters. Because the only way a
nearly $2 trillion valuation makes any
sense is if SpaceX is actually the
company the public believes it to be.
But it's not. If you ask 10 people on
the street what SpaceX sells, most will
say rockets. Some will say Mars stuff,
but both are wrong. SpaceX isn't just a
rocket company. It's actually three
businesses stacked on top of each other.
And the rocket business isn't even the
most important one. There's the good,
the bad, and the ugly that comes with
this company, and trust me, it gets
pretty ugly. So, let's start there. It's
the part of SpaceX that gets the most
attention and creates the least value.
XAI is mostly known for owning the
social media platform Twitter.
>> [clears throat]
>> Uh, sorry. I mean the social media
platform X. Anyways, it's also the AI
lab Elon Musk founded in 2023 to compete
with OpenAI and Anthropic. And a few
months ago, SpaceX acquired XAI in an
all-stock deal that valued the combined
entity at $1.25 trillion, with XAI
itself accounting for 250 billion of
that. If you're wondering how it's
allowed for one of Elon's companies to
acquire another one of Elon's companies,
the answer is I have no idea, but it
happened. So, with a $250 billion
valuation, you'd assume XAI is a
financially sound company, right? Or at
least close to it. Or at a minimum, that
the people who built it still work
there. Well, none of those things are
true. XAI was founded with 11
co-founders, researchers and engineers
from DeepMind, OpenAI, Google, and the
University of Toronto. It was a true
heavyweight team. But, by 2025, the
company was burning more than a billion
dollars a month. And by March of this
year, every single one of the 11
co-founders had walked out from the
company. Then Elon, on his own social
media platform, publicly admitted that
XAI had to be rebuilt from the
foundations up, which is the polite way
of saying the CEO of SpaceX just paid
$250 billion
for an asset that needs to be rebuilt
from scratch. And to say that XAI is
overvalued would still be a massive
understatement. OpenAI generates around
$24 billion in revenue annually and is
currently valued at around $850 billion.
While Anthropic generates over $30
billion annually and is valued around
$400 billion. But, XAI, who estimates a
billion dollars in revenue, was bought
for $250 billion. So, the market is
pricing XAI like it's Emirates, but in
reality, it's more like Spirit Airlines.
I like to look at XAI as the reverse
Jerome Powell piece of SpaceX. Instead
of printing cash, it burns whatever cash
the rest of the business generates. But,
it's also only one of the three
businesses inside SpaceX. The other two
businesses are the ones actually doing
the work. But, before we get to the
crown jewel, let's start with the one
that gives the company its name.
>> [music]
>> This is the part most people picture
when they hear the name SpaceX. It's the
rocket business. It launches things into
orbit, satellites for the US government,
cargo to the International Space
Station, crewed missions for NASA, and a
lot of other satellites, which we'll get
to in a minute. And the rocket business
at SpaceX generated roughly $4 billion
in revenue last year, which may sound
impressive until you compare it to the
$2 trillion valuation. Then, it suddenly
doesn't sound impressive at all,
especially when you realize the rocket
business represented only about a
quarter of SpaceX's total revenue last
year. So, this brings us to the third
business. It's the one most people don't
think about when they hear the word
SpaceX, but it's also the one that
investors care about most, and it's the
one that's paying the bills for
everything else.
>> [music]
>> This is the crown jewel of SpaceX.
Starlink is a satellite internet
provider. It's the answer to the
question, what if Comcast, but in space,
which sounds like the kind of thing a
venture capitalist tweets at 3:00 in the
morning, except in this case, Elon
actually built it. And Starlink launched
in beta in 2020, and 6 years later, it's
the fastest-scaling telecom company in
human history. There are now more than
10,000 Starlink satellites in Earth's
orbit, each one beaming internet down to
a little dish that sits on your roof.
The dish points itself at the
satellites. The satellites talk to each
other, and somehow this works. Here's
what entrepreneur and podcast host Scott
Galloway had to say about Starlink.
And then, the best product, I think, the
last few years has been Starlink.
That's amazing.
>> I just think it's absolute I've done
podcasts from planes.
I can talk to my sons on FaceTime. That
product is,
you know, all airlines are flying the
same tin can, same routes, same bad
food. A real point of differentiation
for them, and it's also in maritime.
I think Starlink is the best tech
product. So, power to him.
When they go public, is it an amazing
company, or is it overvalued? The answer
is yes. Two can be true at the same
time. Starlink has now grown to over 10
million active subscribers in roughly
150 countries. And in 2025, Starlink
alone brought in $11.4 billion dollars
revenue, which is roughly 61% of
SpaceX's total revenue for the year.
But, Starlink's ability to generate
revenue isn't even the most impressive
part. It's the efficiency underneath
that revenue which blows my mind. 2
years ago, Starlink's profit margins
were about 41%. This year, it's now 63%,
which means Starlink added over 20
points in margin expansion in just 2
years. So, yeah, the margins aren't just
good, they're also accelerating. And
Starlink isn't just for consumer
internet, either. There's a maritime
version that ships and yachts use, an
aviation version that commercial
airlines have started to roll out, and a
classified defense version called
Starshield with contracts at the
National Reconnaissance Office and the
Pentagon. So, this is the real SpaceX.
It's a satellite internet provider that
prints cash, a rocket business that's
doing pretty good, but is valued like
it's already colonized Mars, and after
the February merger, an AI lab that
lights roughly a billion dollars a month
on fire. And in 2025, Starlink and the
rocket business brought in roughly 8
billion dollars in profits, which sounds
great until you remember xAI showed up
to ruin the party. Because the
consolidated company of SpaceX, which
also now includes xAI, ended up losing
nearly 5 billion dollars last year on
roughly 18 and 1/2 billion dollars in
revenue. So, let's go back to the
question from earlier. Who the is
buying SpaceX at a 1.75 trillion dollar
valuation? And our answer to this
question from earlier still stands. It's
you. And this is where the real story
for the SpaceX IPO actually is. It's not
about rockets. It's not about magic
satellites in space. It's about the
financial system changing the rules
right before the biggest IPO in market
history. Because on May 1st of this
year, Nasdaq adopted something called
the fast entry rule. And with SpaceX
reportedly targeting a June date for
their initial public offering, the
timing for this new rule is extremely
convenient. But, before we get into how
we've quietly changed the rules to roll
out the red carpet for SpaceX, a quick
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And now back to that red carpet we
rolled out for SpaceX and where it
actually leads. The Nasdaq 100 is the
gold standard for technology and growth
companies. It's not only a badge of
honor for companies to be included in
it, but there's more than 200 investment
products with over $600 in assets that
track the index. Which means once you're
included in the index, it basically
forces every investment fund that
follows the index to automatically buy
your stock, which translates to billions
of dollars of investment capital. And
under the old rules, a newly listed
company had to wait at least three
months before it could be added to the
NASDAQ 100 index. That waiting period
existed for a reason. It gave the market
time to discover the actual price before
passive index funds were forced to buy
in. But the new fast entry rule cuts
that waiting period from three months to
just 15 trading days. It's three months
of price discovery compressed into three
weeks, which speeds up the process for
SpaceX to get that automatic demand
coming in. But this isn't even the
change that matters most, because there
was also two other rule changes. There
also used to be a minimum free float
requirement to join the NASDAQ 100. A
company needed at least 10% of its
shares actually available for the public
to buy and sell. SpaceX is targeting a
free float of 4 to 5%. Under the old
rules, they wouldn't qualify. Under the
new rules, that minimum is gone. And
SpaceX suddenly qualifies. And then
there's also the new hidden multiplier.
This one is the hardest to wrap my head
around. Because buried in the technical
language of the new rules is a hidden
multiplier. For companies with a free
float under 20%, NASDAQ now treats the
float as three times bigger than it
actually is. Meaning a 4% float gets
weighted as if it were 12%. A 5% float
gets weighted as if it were We've bent
the rules and rolled out the red carpet
for SpaceX. We've changed the listing
requirements so that SpaceX can join the
index with just 5% of the company
actually trading publicly. A float level
that would have been an automatic
disqualification six months ago. We've
changed the price discovery timeline so
that SpaceX skips the standard three
month seasoning and gets dropped into
the index just 15 trading days after
going public. And we've changed the
waiting rule so that ETFs are now
legally required to treat SpaceX's float
as if it were three times larger than it
actually is, meaning we've built
manufactured demand. And this is all
unfolding right now, but it's not just
SpaceX. OpenAI and Anthropic are both
reportedly eyeing their own public
listings this year, and both will almost
certainly list with the same
configuration the new rules were quietly
tailored for, meaning the Nasdaq didn't
rewrite the rules for one company. It
rewrote them for a class of companies,
and SpaceX was just the first in line.
So, Nasdaq cleared the runway for
SpaceX. The question now is who actually
gets on the plane, which brings us to
the retail allocation part of the
listing. Because while most initial
public offerings allocate 5 to 10% of
the offering to retail investors, SpaceX
is targeting 30%, and Bret Johnson, the
CFO of SpaceX, told a room full of
bankers on the record that retail is
going to be a critical part of the IPO
and bigger than any IPO in history
because, in his words, retail buyers
have been incredibly supportive of us
and of Elon for a long time, and we want
to make sure that we recognize that.
Translated out of corporate speak, the
CFO of SpaceX told a room of bankers
that the largest initial public offering
in history is going to dump 30% of its
supply on retail buyers, and not because
retail buyers help with price stability,
not because they help with long-term
shareholder alignment, because they're
loyal to Elon, and that's how this story
unfolds. The buyers and sellers of
SpaceX don't show up at the same time.
The buyers are forced in early. The
sellers are unlocked later. Shares move
from insiders sitting on a low-cost
basis to passive funds and retail, whose
retirement accounts absorb them at peak
valuation. Portfolio manager George
Noble said it best, "Your 401k is the
exit liquidity." Because if you have any
sort of retirement account holding US
stock index funds, then within a few
weeks of the SpaceX listing, you're
going to own some stock, and you won't
have a vote on it. You won't have a
choice in it. The mechanics of passive
investing will just buy it for you. So,
here's the corrected version of SpaceX.
It's a mashup of three businesses that
combined lost $5 billion last year
listing at the largest IPO valuation in
human history, and we're all going to be
buyers within a few weeks because of
manufactured demand. And there's a
reason traditional financial media isn't
covering it this way. It isn't
clickable. Because SpaceX to go public
at a nearly $2 trillion valuation is a
headline. But Nasdaq quietly rewrote its
float waiting methodology to engineer
passive fund demand for an unprofitable
company. Well, that doesn't quite roll
off the tongue as smooth. So, if you
want to actually better understand
what's happening in finance and
economics, hit subscribe. Because I can
assure you one thing, passive investing
was sold to you as the smart way to
invest, low fees, diversification, you
can set it and forget it, that it's the
triumph of common sense over Wall
Street's hot shot stock pickers. And all
of that's true, but there's also a part
of the pitch nobody mentioned, that the
same mechanism that buys the index for
you automatically also buys whatever
gets added to it without your input and
without anyone asking you. So, the
feature that makes passive investing
convenient and easy for you is the same
feature that makes you a guaranteed
buyer for anyone who can squeeze their
way into the index. And right now,
somebody just squeezed their way in.
>> [music]
Ask follow-up questions or revisit key timestamps.
The video argues that SpaceX's upcoming record-breaking IPO, valued at $1.75 trillion, is being facilitated by significant changes to Nasdaq rules. The company is characterized as a combination of three distinct businesses: an unprofitable AI lab (xAI), a moderately successful rocket business, and a highly profitable, fast-growing satellite internet service (Starlink). The video suggests that recent 'fast entry' rule changes by the Nasdaq, including reduced waiting periods and altered float requirements, are designed to force passive index funds to buy into the IPO early, essentially using retail retirement accounts as exit liquidity for insiders.
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