On June 12, Elon Musk’s company SpaceX went public. The company was the largest initial public offering (IPO) in history, hitting a public market valuation of $2.1 trillion and becoming the sixth-most valuable US firm overnight, later rising even higher to fourth. As of now, SpaceX has raised nearly $86 billion, or triple the size of the previous IPO record of commerce company Alibaba’s in 2014. Musk became the world’s first trillionaire, more than four thousand current and former SpaceX employees became millionaires, and over twenty institutional investors held stakes worth more than $1 billion.

This is despite the company accumulating a $4.9 billion net loss last year and more than $41 billion in losses since its founding. Roughly $75 billion of the firm’s balance sheet represents a Trojan horse of debt inherited from xAI and X, other companies owned by Musk that he transferred onto SpaceX’s books just a few months before the IPO. For every dollar of revenue the AI segment earned in 2025, it lost two dollars. To use finance industry metrics, SpaceX shares currently have a price-to-earning ratio of -61.09 (compared to an industry average of 11.51).

The scale of the SpaceX IPO is not the result of the free market’s boundless possibilities or remarkable feats in innovation but a complex, sophisticated initiative in financial engineering and upward wealth redistribution. The deal was structured, at every level, to let financial insiders and longtime Musk supporters capture the gains and exit well before the valuation has a chance to come back down to Earth, while ordinary households are left holding risk they never chose to take on and facing the consequences of deepening inequality.