SpaceX IPO reveals X's decline as Musk's power and wealth surge
· Nilay Patel
Elon Musk is taking SpaceX public, and the IPO filing reveals just how much the rules are being bent to make it happen.…
Elon Musk is taking SpaceX public, and the IPO filing reveals just how much the rules are being bent to make it happen. The offering could be the largest in history, raising $50 to $75 billion. But the structure of the deal is raising alarms. Musk holds about 85 percent voting control through super-shares, and he’s already voting shares from an unearned pay package tied to absurd milestones like building a Mars colony. Normally, shareholders can sue over fraud or securities violations. In this IPO, they’re forced into arbitration instead. Musk has essentially removed that avenue for accountability.
The filing also gives us the first real look at X, the platform formerly known as Twitter. It’s shrinking. Revenue is down year over year, user growth is flat, and the business is a fraction of what it was before Musk bought it in 2022. But that might not matter. X has been folded into xAI, then into SpaceX, and it’s become an afterthought in Musk’s empire. He still uses it constantly, and it gives him a distribution platform for his own content. But as a standalone business, it’s a failure.
SpaceX itself is a strange bet. Starlink is the only profitable piece, generating $11.4 billion in revenue. The launch business loses money on NASA contracts. The AI division is bleeding $6.4 billion. And the total addressable market claimed in the filing, $28 trillion, is based on promises about data centers in space and Martian colonies that don’t exist yet. Musk is selling a vision, not a business.
The most underreported part of this IPO is how quickly it will land in index funds. SpaceX gets into the Nasdaq-100 after just 15 days, instead of the usual 90. That forces every passive retirement account and index fund to buy shares whether investors want to or not. Fund managers admit they’d rather take the risk of losing money alongside everyone else than miss out entirely. That’s the fear of missing out on a trillion-dollar CEO, and it’s rewriting the rules of public markets.