SpaceX's IPO is set to be the biggest ever and could make Elon Musk a trillionaire

NEW YORK (AP): SpaceX says it plans to raise up to US$75 billion when it goes public this month, setting the stage for the largest-ever stock market debut and putting Elon Musk on course to becoming the world's first trillionaire.

The company, formally known as Space Exploration Technologies Corp, said on Wednesday it will sell 555.6 million shares at US$135 apiece. The offering would give SpaceX a market value of US$1.77 trillion. Only six companies in the S&P 500 are currently worth more, with Nvidia tops at US$5.2 trillion.

Besides the size of the offering and the expected proceeds, SpaceX's amended prospectus updates details about how much control of the company Musk will have. As SpaceX's CEO, chief technical officer and chairman, Musk's voting power will come primarily through his ownership of 5.22 billion Class B shares, which give the holder 10 votes for every share held. According to the filing, Musk would have 82.4 per cent of the voting power in the company.

Forbes currently values Musk's net worth at US$826 billion and his stake in SpaceX at US$542 billion.

The estimated proceeds from the SpaceX IPO would easily top the US$26 billion raised by oil giant Saudi Aramco in 2019.

Time will tell how SpaceX fares on the market. Musk's plans for the company are as fantastical as the money he hopes to raise in the sale.

The IPO document strikes a contrast with the typically dry, technical prose in IPO documents, detailing plans to use proceeds from the sale to help put men on the moon again, and perhaps even Mars. In one section, it talks of a need to build "a permanent human colony" on the Red Planet with "at least one million inhabitants" as existential threats loom that could consign man to "the same fate as the dinosaurs".

And SpaceX isn't the only colossal market debut investors are now bracing for. Earlier this week, Anthropic submitted a confidential filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to officially start its own IPO clock.

OpenAI has not yet reported filing the initial SEC paperwork, but an IPO from the ChatGPT maker is widely expected.

-AP