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SpaceX is taking off. And we're not just talking about rockets. We've never seen anything like this. SpaceX's initial public offering is expected to raise as much as $75 billion, more than double the record setting $29.4 billion raised by Saudi Aramco in 2019. This is the biggest IPO of all time. We're looking at $2 trillion valuation. Elon long had said that he didn't really plan on taking SpaceX public, but that was before the merger with XAI before he needed tens of billions of dollars to build out these ambitions. But this massive valuation is also a test. Could all this hype make it seem worth more than it is? If it's preordained then it becomes hard to predict
how much of the buyers are buying because of fundamentals or the valuation. So then that kind of distorts the market. Investors are buying the dream. Sure, we all know the dream, but what about the reality? Traditionally, an IPO or initial public offering was a primary way for companies to raise money. Going public was also a badge of honor. But today, companies have all kinds of access to capital to fund their early growth.
This is a huge narrative in the American stock market right now where companies that used to go public at very early stage now, can wait really almost as long as they want because they have sources of funds that don't require public investors. This trend has been fairly consistent with the number of publicly listed companies in the US falling since the 90s. SpaceX is an extreme case, but it's definitely not a one off. A lot of companies are choosing to stay private, choosing to scale privately, choosing to raise funds privately and then go public. And when they go public, they're already a mega cap.
SpaceX's 277 page filing with the SEC takes about as long to read as a journey to Mars. It depicts a conglomerate handling dollar amounts practically unheard of in any other IPO. And that filing is giving us a little bit more of a peek here into the health of this company. After 2023, the company made a profit of $791 million, only to lose 4.94 billion in 2025. But between 2024 and 2025, its total revenue continued to grow from $14 billion to $18.5 billion. We're looking at an estimated revenue projection between 22 and 24 billion. But when you compare that to the total valuation of the company that SpaceX is looking at for this IPO, we're looking at $2 trillion in valuation. That is a very big discrepancy.
And you can see that discrepancy here. Looking at major tech stocks, investors value Tesla and Nvidia at roughly 15 times their annual revenue. They look like bargains compared to SpaceX and its price to sales ratio of 87 times. SpaceX today is a very different company than the SpaceX that was founded more than 20 years ago. It is the largest satellite operator in the entire world with its Starlink constellation, with thousands and thousands of satellites operate in low Earth orbit that provide broadband internet to the ground below.
So those are very real businesses that SpaceX has both commandeered and dominated. On top of that, it operates rocket transportation services, either sending cargo and humans to space. Even Mars travel someday. Those are still quite speculative and a years away. All of these ambitious IPO related programs all rely on Starship, and it's probably the most ambitious vehicle that's ever been conceived for spaceflight.
It's meant to be fully reusable, that makes it extremely complicated, and its development process has been kind of rocky in order to get there. And this is a rocket that last time exploded on the pad. So like you think you want to think it's going to go well. So much of its, value proposition is tied up in stuff that hasn't quite happened yet. Even though rockets and satellites have been its bread and butter, there's another, more pressing reason to go public now. They're also slowly becoming an AI company and building out data centers to both train and operate, AI in the future. The amount of capital that they need to, execute on all of these really ambitious goals is just going to require a lot more
than maybe they can receive from all of their various businesses in a short amount of time. This concept of using SpaceX. As you know, this new real estate for putting AI data centers that seemed to be the game changer that got Elon thinking, okay, now might be the time to actually go public. An important aspect of SpaceX's IPO will be its inclusion in the Nasdaq 100 index. We have these big indexes like the S&P 500. It tracks the biggest 500 companies in the US or the Nasdaq 100, which are the biggest tech companies.
Many companies or their I say all would like to be added to them, because it means millions and millions of dollars of passive funds. This passive money comes from everywhere pension funds, institutional investors, retirement accounts. Together, trillions of dollars flow automatically into funds like Invesco QQQ, which tracks the Nasdaq 100. If SpaceX is in one of those indexes, it means millions and millions of Americans will hold your company. Once the company is included in the Nasdaq 100 and any investors who are buying the QQQ or will, by definition, be investing
their hard earned money into space, regardless of the valuation. And inclusion in the Nasdaq 100 or S&P 500. Used to be a lengthy process. But now, since many companies going public are already giant, the rules are getting bent. The old playbook was that you go public, you undergo a seasoning period, you prove your profitability, your liquidity. And then maybe you get added The new playbook is the fast track entry. Nasdaq said, okay, we're going to fast track our rules. So instead of being public for three months, you can be part of the Nasdaq 100, and so SpaceX chose to list with Nasdaq.
Still, changing the rules to fast track a whale is not something you see every day in the markets. There are a lot of risks when it comes to fast entry. There's price mismatch, liquidity crowding. And there's also, of course, the overconcentration of mega-cap names because increasingly a lot of our holdings are just very few big companies, these few companies determine the future of your portfolio. The market has become very concentrated. It's very worrisome thing to a lot of people. And SpaceX isn't the only big private company eyeing a blockbuster IPO while clinging to aspirational revenue goals.
If you look at companies like anthropic and OpenAI and the, rates at which they're growing and replicating themselves, those are going to be equally enormous. IPO is probably not very distant future. You can see a case where maybe enormous companies become the rule as far as IPOs go. Going forward, this is going to be the debate. How much dispersion should there be? Who are the winners going to be, and will the appetite remain for all of the other much, much bigger IPOs, it should be said.
Despite the warning signs, many are wary of underestimating Elon Musk. These really built an entire brand on turning science fiction into reality, and investors are willing to bet that even if he doesn't deliver on the timeline, some of these ambitions, like orbital data centers or building a colony on Mars, actually isn't out of the realm of possibility. Yet the pressures of being a public company have a cost. When you shift to a public company, your focus becomes more on short term profits and how you're maximizing those profits for your shareholders. When it comes to SpaceX, there's a very long
lead time of development that they also need to be able to fail. We've seen quite a few explosions here and that doesn't always sit well with investors and shareholders. So it remains to be seen if SpaceX can actually pull all this off. What looks like plausible ambition may end up being completely baseless hope. For now, though, the market seems to have space FOMO on an IPO with potential massive payouts someday. You buy it a trillion, you could potentially sell a 2 trillion. This keeps happening and that's pretty much the story of why space makes sense to a lot of people.
