Elon Musk on Wednesday lent credibility to rumors about a SpaceX initial public offering via a social media interaction with Ars Technica space reporter Eric Berger.
“As usual, Eric is accurate,” Musk said, responding to Berger’s post titled, “Here’s why I think SpaceX is going public soon,” with a link to his Ars Technica piece on the company’s apparent public listing intentions. Musk has said in the past that the company would not go public until its cash flow had become predictable.
The social media interaction followed Tuesday reports from Reuters and other outlets indicating SpaceX hopes to secure more than $25 billion via an IPO next year, potentially elevating its market value to more than $1 trillion.
The last time Musk discussed a SpaceX IPO on social media was in 2023 while denying reports of a 2024 IPO. In 2021, he said an IPO was still at least a few years away.
“At least a few years before Starlink revenue is reasonably predictable,” Musk posted. “Going public sooner than that would be very painful. Will do my best to give long-term Tesla shareholders preference.”
SpaceX, based in Hawthorne, California, represents the world’s second-highest-valued private startup, behind only OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, according to Crunchbase data.
A public offering at the projected valuation would make the company the second-largest completed IPO ever, trailing only Saudi Aramco’s $1.7 trillion offering in 2019. Saudi Aramco is Saudi Arabia’s state-owned oil and natural gas producer. The IPO made 1.5 percent of its shares available to outside investors.
In 2019, an analysis valued SpaceX at $34 billion, based on pre-IPO share marketplaces such as EquityZen. By 2022, that figure had skyrocketed to $125 billion.
In September, SpaceX agreed to pay $17 billion to EchoStar to acquire spectrum licenses, comprising $8.5 billion in cash and an equivalent in SpaceX stock. The licenses would allow SpaceX to develop a new Starlink direct-to-cell system.
Musk’s personal fortune, largely accumulated due to his leadership roles at SpaceX and Tesla, as well as other ventures, briefly reached $500 billion in October 2025, according to Forbes estimates, before closing at $499.1 billion. Some analysts expect him to make a trillion dollars over the next 10 years.
SpaceX’s reusable Falcon rockets and Starship prototypes for Mars missions have made it a leader in commercial space flight. In a 2019 presentation, Musk outlined Starship’s capacity for up to 100 passengers on interplanetary journeys, with goals to make space travel as routine as aviation. Despite setbacks in NASA contracts, SpaceX maintains dominance in launches for government and private clients.
Reuters contributed to this report
