SpaceX plans to reserve 30% of shares for retail investors, the timeline for the largest IPO in history revealed

Ask AI · How Will SpaceX’s Listing Affect the Global Tech IPO Market Landscape?

Image created with AI tools

By Lu Yu

Edited by Xu Qingyang

Elon Musk’s rocket company SpaceX is preparing to go public—and it’s creating quite a commotion.

On April 7, local time, SpaceX brought all 21 investment banks involved in this IPO into an online meeting room, laying out the IPO timetable and the rollout pace—this is the first time all the banks have been brought together in a single meeting, and to some extent it suggests the matter has moved from “planned” to “countdown.”

The timetable looks like this:

Late May: Prospectus unveiled to the public

June 7: Around 125 analysts meet face-to-face with the company’s management to “have a chat”

The week of June 8: Official launch of the roadshow, starting global solicitation for orders

June 11: Investor event for about 1,500 retail investors worldwide

The roster of investment banks is also very impressive—five major banks are leading together: Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, and Goldman Sachs. In addition, 16 other institutions handle firm allocation, retail distribution, and international offering—basically, they’ve put every card Wall Street has on the table.

Actually, earlier still, on April 1 SpaceX quietly filed its IPO application with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (confidential version), with a plan to list in June. This timing is quite interesting—OpenAI and Anthropic have also been preparing for listings recently, but SpaceX is very likely to cross the finish line first.

The question is: with such a large offering, can the market absorb it?

Several investment-banking insiders said they have already started to worry that SpaceX could concentrate fundraising and market attention in the short term, potentially squeezing other companies’ issuance space. During Facebook’s IPO in 2012, a similar capital-concentration effect also appeared, but at a clearly smaller scale than this time.

The division of labor for the international offering is also very clear: Citigroup coordinates overall, Barclays handles the UK, Deutsche Bank and UBS handle Europe, Royal Bank of Canada handles Canada, Mizuho handles Asia, and Macquarie handles Australia—rolled out globally. In addition, SpaceX is reportedly considering setting up a dual-class share structure; in simple terms, this means Musk will keep control of the company and prevent post-listing shareholders from taking over.

It’s also reported that, to secure underwriting seats for this deal, some investment banks have already demonstrated their “loyalty” at the business level. It is said to include purchasing and deploying the Grok system from xAI, Musk’s company. These kinds of moves are not unheard of in investment banking, but what’s unusual here is both the intensity of execution and the scale involved.

01 Retail allocation at the highest level in history

What has drawn the most market attention for this IPO is the breakthrough arrangement for retail investors. SpaceX’s CFO Brett Johnsen said bluntly: “Retail investors will be the core of this IPO, with a proportion exceeding any prior large listing in history.”

According to the information released, the maximum retail subscription allocation this time can reach up to 30%, far above the industry norm of 5% to 10%. This arrangement is seen as a reward for long-term supporters, giving this IPO an unprecedented breadth of mass participation.

This design not only reshapes the issuance structure, but may also reshape market trading behavior. Multiple institutions believe that a large influx of retail investors will strengthen the market’s emotion-driven characteristics, leading to higher volatility in the stock price in the IPO’s early stage. And the narrative of “participation by everyone” further reinforces SpaceX’s status as a phenomenon-level asset.

But from an investment logic perspective, the risks are also clearly evident. In academic circles, it is widely believed that the IPO is not a universal windfall benefit for everyone; the real excess returns in the primary market are largely concentrated in institutional investors that get allocated at the offering price. Even if ordinary investors participate, they are often merely absorbing the hype premium in the secondary market, and once market sentiment cools, price pullbacks are also commonplace.

Beyond that, deeper changes come from the spillover effect of passive capital diffusion. Given SpaceX’s scale, after listing it will very likely be quickly incorporated into mainstream index systems. At that time, a large amount of capital that does not actively pick stocks—especially index funds and ETFs—will passively allocate to this stock. This means SpaceX will no longer be just an optional target; it will become a core weighting in the entire market that everyone can’t avoid.

This structural change is also rewriting how market risk is distributed. When the share of a few giants in the indices continues to rise, the broad market portfolio investors hold is, in essence, becoming increasingly concentrated in a small number of companies. SpaceX’s listing will likely further intensify this trend.

02 Valuation makes a three-step leap in a matter of months

SpaceX’s valuation has jumped repeatedly within just a few months: from $800 billion at the end of 2025, to $1.25 trillion at the start of 2026, and then to the current target range of $1.75 trillion to $2.0 trillion.

This “three-step leap” is mainly the result of business boundary expansion, changes in the market environment, and a resonance in capital expectations.

On one hand, beyond its traditional rocket launch business and Starlink satellite internet business, SpaceX has added xAI to its roadmap, causing the company to be redefined as a composite platform spanning aerospace, communications, and artificial intelligence. On the other hand, over the past year, the overall valuation of AI assets has been lifted—even though xAI is still in a catch-up stage, it has been incorporated into a high-growth narrative. Combined with the scarcity premium created by the long-term lack of same-level targets in the primary market, all three together push valuation higher.

It is precisely this layering of multiple concepts that makes the IPO pricing of SpaceX appear unclear and harder to anchor.

The industry finds it difficult to label SpaceX. It doesn’t “talk” through orders and cash flow like traditional aerospace companies do; it doesn’t stake its dominance on user numbers like communications companies; and it doesn’t put everything on technical expectations like AI companies. It has all three attributes, but it’s hard to fully benchmark it against any one category of company. This also makes it harder for the market to form a unified pricing consensus, and stock prices become more easily swayed by fund flows and sentiment fluctuations.

This trend has already shown up in the secondary market in advance. As expectations for SpaceX’s listing heat up, related space-economy themes see a collective re-rating: Rocket Lab is up about 7%, Firefly Aerospace and Intuitive Machines rise by nearly 25%, and satellite service providers such as Planet Labs and Viasat generally record double-digit growth. This synchronized rise essentially means the market is building an advance valuation reference framework for SpaceX, but it also plants the risk of volatility transmission. If SpaceX’s listing performance falls short of expectations, valuation pullbacks may spread quickly to the entire sector through this chain of correlation.

From a broader perspective, the more critical constraint comes from the market’s ability to absorb.

The current IPO market has not fully recovered yet. According to data from Renaissance Capital, as of this year only 35 companies have completed IPOs, down 37.5% year over year. Against this backdrop, SpaceX’s single-ticket financing size of $50 billion to $75 billion will clearly consume market liquidity. If you further add the potential financing needs of OpenAI and Anthropic combined—nearly $50 billion—the total is almost equivalent to the total venture-capital-backed IPO financing supported over the past decade.

A clear logic chain follows: the larger the financing scale, the more it concentrates in consuming funds and underwriting resources; the more concentrated the resources are, the higher the probability that smaller and mid-sized IPOs get sidelined; with fewer optional targets available, the capital game becomes even more focused on top-tier projects, which in turn amplifies price volatility. In such a structure, even the most eye-catching asset cannot completely escape the constraint of a buyers’ market. In other words, whether valuation can hold steady depends not only on whether the story is grand, but also on whether the market has enough real money to back it.

03 Controversy over a space data center

The long-term blueprint Musk has drawn for SpaceX is to build a space data center, using orbital solar power to break through limits on terrestrial energy supply. Logically, this idea is highly compelling and directly targets the core pain point of today’s AI compute being constrained by energy supply. But in terms of execution, it still remains at a highly forward-looking conceptual stage.

From the standpoint of technical implementation, this concept faces at least three layers of constraints.

First is on-orbit construction capability: currently, humanity has not yet formed a mature system for assembling large-scale space structures. Second are extreme operating environments, including solar radiation, the challenges of thermal control, and threats from space debris;

Third is the level of automation: the high-precision space robotics needed have not yet been industrialized.

These problems cannot be solved by a single technical breakthrough in one area; they depend on a leap in systems engineering capability, and the implementation timeline is highly uncertain.

It’s precisely because of this that, in today’s capital market, this story is more like a “concept and vision.” When a company doesn’t yet have stable profits to support it, the market often needs a sufficiently large future to justify its valuation—and a space data center provides just such an almost boundaryless narrative. But conversely, once market sentiment turns cold, or if actual progress can’t keep up, this portion of the premium will be compressed first.

When you put the far-future narrative of a space data center into a more macro market framework, the spillover effects it brings are gradually becoming visible. The current IPO market is at a critical juncture: on the one hand, many technology companies have postponed going public for years, and pressure from capital exits continues to build; on the other hand, uncertainty in the macro environment still suppresses risk appetite. Against this backdrop, SpaceX’s listing performance will directly determine the direction of many subsequent projects.

The causal relationship between the two is very clear: if SpaceX performs strongly after listing, it will set a landmark successful template for the market, effectively releasing long-piled-up financing and exit demand and pushing the overall IPO market window to fully restart; if, however, its listing performance falls short of expectations, it could further intensify the market’s wait-and-see sentiment, forcing more companies to delay their listing plans, and even postponing the overall IPO window until 2027.

In the end, this IPO from SpaceX is not only one company’s listing—it is a stress test of the market’s ability to absorb. It doesn’t matter whether the story is big enough; what matters is whether the market has enough real money to take it.

(Translated with contributions from Wuji, an invited translation partner for this article from Tencent Technology.)