Will Musk become the world's first trillionaire?

Forbes’ latest data locks in a highly suspenseful number: Elon Musk’s current net worth is approximately $823 billion—about $180 billion shy of the trillion-dollar mark.

He has never been this close to this historic milestone. And what will likely fill in that final piece of the wealth map for him is not Tesla, still mired in a price war, nor even Neuralink, which is still in its early stages—but rather an IPO that has been brewing for a long time.

In early April, multiple mainstream media outlets cited sources as saying that SpaceX has secretly filed an IPO registration draft with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, targeting a listing in June 2026.

But compared with the leap in Musk’s personal wealth, what the capital markets care about more is another underlying logic: why is this company worth so much money in the first place?

The biggest IPO in history

The scale of this IPO is disruptive. An expected fundraising size of over $75 billion directly shatters the $29 billion record set in 2019 by Saudi Aramco. The company’s overall valuation lands in the $1.5 trillion to $1.75 trillion range, and some sources have even reportedly pushed the expectation up to $2 trillion.

A syndicate of 21 banks will underwrite it, with Morgan Stanley leading. Platforms such as Robinhood and SoFi will handle the retail side, offering individual investors roughly 30% of the allocation—whereas traditional IPOs typically give only 10%.

Providing that 30% to retail investors is not to stabilize the share price. In the logic of capital markets, retail investors are synonymous with high volatility and high liquidity. Musk is aiming to use a massive fan base and a faith-driven bid to manufacture extreme FOMO emotions in the early days after listing, turning SpaceX into the largest “faith stock” in history.

Once this is clear, Musk’s route for wealth growth becomes very straightforward. Forbes’ current estimate of $823 billion already includes SpaceX’s valuation in the private market of about $1.25 trillion.

What helps him cross the trillion-dollar threshold is not an asset conjured out of thin air, but a sentiment premium from the public markets. Jumping from $1.25 trillion in private markets to $1.75 trillion in the IPO—and possibly even higher—will have those several-hundred-billion-dollar gaps fill in that last $180 billion shortfall.

What exactly is SpaceX

If your understanding of SpaceX is still stuck at “launching rockets for NASA,” then you’re at least five years behind the times. Today, SpaceX has been transformed into a composite tech powerhouse with no direct analog in the capital market.

One of SpaceX’s advantages is control over launch costs. The reusability technology of the Falcon series reduces the cost per launch by more than 70% compared with traditional expendable rockets, and each rocket has already achieved up to 29 reuses. In 2025, SpaceX is expected to complete about 170 launches—roughly half of the world’s total in-orbit launch volume at the orbital level.

This not only means more profit room; it also means the threshold to reach space is being systematically lowered. And this massive, low-cost redundant capacity is being used directly to deploy Starlink satellites at high density.

Starlink is currently the core pillar supporting SpaceX’s valuation. As of the end of 2025, Starlink satellites in orbit have exceeded 9,000, covering 146 countries worldwide, with paid users surpassing 9 million. In all of 2025, Starlink contributed about 50% to 80% of the company’s total annual revenue of roughly $16 billion.

It is, in essence, a global mobile communications network that breaks free from ground base stations, able to reach places traditional operators can’t—such as polar regions, plateaus, deep oceans, and rainforests. As the latest generation of satellites has achieved direct connection with ordinary phones—without switching SIM cards to get online—it has almost irreplaceable technical capability to provide service to billions of mobile users worldwide.

Between these two businesses, there is a precisely designed business flywheel: lower launch costs attract more commercial orders; order revenue and redundant launch capacity are then used directly to deploy Starlink satellites densely; Starlink user growth generates sustained cash flow; and that cash flow fuels even more aggressive rocket R&D, further driving down costs.

SpaceX does not rely on any single customer, nor does it rely on government order cycles, forming a structure that can continuously reinforce itself.

What SpaceX has been doing these past two years

What has excited Wall Street even more is that, after completing the all-stock acquisition of the AI company xAI in February 2026 and then integrating the social platform X into the overall structure, the combined valuation will be around $1.25 trillion.

Standing at the doorstep of the IPO, SpaceX already holds four cards at once: the world’s largest low-orbit satellite network; the rocket company with the #1 share in global commercial launches; a top-tier AI company; and a social platform with hundreds of millions of monthly active users.

This combination has no direct analog in the capital markets. Space companies don’t have its communications network; communications giants can’t build its rockets; and AI giants can’t touch orbital infrastructure either. Once you control the channel to enter orbit, you effectively control the entry point to the space economy.

What SpaceX is building is a closed-loop ecosystem spanning aerospace, communications, and artificial intelligence—and this ecosystem is still expanding.

Why it can be worth $1.5 trillion

If you look only at financials, SpaceX does not meet the traditional “trillion-dollar company” standard. Based on roughly $16 billion in revenue in 2025, a $1.75 trillion valuation implies about 110x the price-to-sales ratio. Compared with Apple at around 9x and Google at around 6x, the number doesn’t hold up in conventional finance terms. Then what is the market actually pricing?

This eye-popping option premium directly points to three layers of expectations. The most realistic is Starlink’s potential to break into the mainstream: thanks to its phone-direct connection technology, it is moving straight from edge areas without coverage into the mainstream foundation of global mobile communications at the trillion-dollar level, with its annual revenue ceiling—according to Musk’s view—raised as high as $100 billion.

Even more disruptive is Starship’s cost revolution: once this beast with a one-launch payload capacity of 150 tons lowers the cost to put a payload into orbit to within $100 per kilogram, the underlying logic of the entire space economy will be rewritten completely. And farther out is the grand narrative of orbital data centers, the “Moonbase Alpha” lunar city, and more.

What SpaceX is truly being priced for is the future. In a sense, when a company’s structure is solid enough and its flywheel is self-consistent enough, the market starts paying option premiums for a future that hasn’t happened yet. SpaceX’s IPO is not an ordinary listing.

When valuation is no longer determined entirely by profits, but by structure, narrative, and future upside space, what investors are buying is ultimately a belief—faith in the space economy, in the reconfiguration of global communications, and in humanity pushing further toward new frontiers.

The capital event drawing the most attention

SpaceX’s IPO will very likely become the most watched capital markets event of 2026.

SpaceX has never publicly disclosed financial statements. It is a privately held company, and all prior valuations and figures have come from secondary-market transactions and analyst estimates. This secret submission of IPO filings is the first time it has formally reported financial information to regulators. Once the formal prospectus is published, the market’s understanding of its true profitability will undergo a recalibration.

The widely cited “Musk’s stake is about 42%” is already like carving in stone. After going through the all-stock acquisition of xAI, consolidating X, and the massive fundraising dilution that is coming, the exact percentage of his holdings in the new entity will only be formally disclosed when the S-1 filing is released. But that doesn’t prevent him from being the most certain beneficiary as the largest single shareholder in this wealth-creation feast.

There is another clue worth watching: over the past five years, SpaceX has received about $6 billion in contracts from government agencies such as NASA and the Department of Defense, while Donald Trump’s eldest son holds an indirect stake through 1789 Capital. This kind of political-business entanglement is facing increasingly strict compliance scrutiny from Wall Street.

Its significance is not only a giant financing round—it also allows the public to truly see, through公开 financial documents, how much this company that is changing the global space landscape has actually earned, where it has spent the money, and where it intends to go next.