Outside was too hot. So I decided to stay in over the weekend to study the craziest IPO in history.

It wasn’t a good idea.

Here are the top 9 craziest facts about SpaceX IPO I wish I didn’t spend the weekend on.

1. Elon’s pay package is tied to a colony on Mars!
He was granted 1bn performance-based shares that vest only if SpaceX establishes a permanent human colony on Mars with at least 1m people (among other crazy objectives).
The package could be worth over $140b at IPO price.

2. Musk will be almost impossible to fire.
He could be removed only by a majority vote of Class B shareholders.
But he owns 93.6% of them, with super-voting rights. Lol 😅

3. SpaceX is the space market!
Since 2024, it has carried almost 90% of everything sent into space.
Other players are almost insignificant.

4. Elon might become history’s first trillionaire.

5. SpaceX executives might become billionaires.
President Gwynne Shotwell and CFO Bret Johnsen could each be worth more than $1bn.
Not bad.

6. It might be the largest IPO in history by capital raised.

7. SpaceX could become the 7th-largest US-listed company by market cap, but only around the 200th by revenue.

8. Its target valuation-to-revenue multiple is ~94x.
For comparison, Meta IPO’d at 22x revenue in 2012.
Tesla now trades at “just” 16x.

9. SpaceX claims it will serve a total addressable market of $28.5tn.
The Financial Times calculates that its valuation “makes sense” if SpaceX manages to capture "just" 3% of it.
The craziest bets, like life on Mars and asteroid mining, are not even included in its TAM calculations.

Sources: SpaceX S-1 filings, Financial Times, The Economist.

Carousel courtesy of ChatGPT, in the design style of The Economist.

First post in a SpaceX IPO mini series.

Tomorrow the second one.