$2 trillion !!
This is the largest IPO in history. And if it happens, it’s a signal capitalism is eating itself.
I’ll explain why — but first, the numbers from the actual filing.
1. The losses.
Net loss of $4.94 billion last year. They went from a $791 million profit in 2024 to losing nearly $5 billion in 2025. One year. The AI division — absorbed after the xAI merger — accounts for most of it, with $6.36 billion in operating losses in 2025 alone.
2. The valuation math.
The price-to-sales ratio is 109–116x trailing revenue. No company — not Palantir, not Snowflake, not Airbnb at peak hype — has debuted at this multiple. And those companies, for lower valuations, had better unit economics, lower losses, and in Palantir’s case, strong government contracts to back them up.
3. One person in charge of everything.
Musk will be CEO, CTO, and Chairman. Simultaneously. He also controls 85.1% of voting power through a super-voting share structure. You’re not buying a stake in a company with real governance. You’re betting on one person making good decisions — while also running Tesla and X. :-)
4. The retail trap.
Most IPOs give retail investors 5–10% of shares. SpaceX is giving them up to 30% — via Robinhood, Fidelity, and Schwab.
This is framed as democratising capital markets. It isn’t.
When institutional buyers — the ones who do real due diligence — don’t absorb enough of the offering, the gap gets filled by retail. Add mutual fund investments into the mix, and it’s ordinary people who will pay the price when this corrects.
“We do not want humans to have the same fate as dinosaurs.” — SpaceX S-1 filing
That is in the legal document submitted to the SEC.
Photo by okslop
Because what SpaceX is doing — successfully — builds a business model where founders have more incentive to focus on narrative and propaganda than on actual business fundamentals. The goal shifts from building a sustainable company to offloading as much equity as possible to retail investors, directly or via mutual funds.
Capitalism was supposed to be about risk and reward. The people who take the risk get the reward.
What’s happening here is different. The risk is being distributed to everyone. The reward is restricted to a very few.
Musk — generational wealth. VCs — beautiful exit. Early employees — finally liquid. Retail investors and mutual fund holders — they absorb the downside.
As always.
If you love capitalism — if you believe in the idea that markets allocate risk and reward fairly — you should be very wary of this trend.
This isn’t capitalism being disrupted. It’s capitalism being gamed by the people best placed to game it.
And the problem is they’ll get away with this time, but more and more people will copy it, and sooner or later the system will revolt. Which would mean a desruption of capitalism.
Capitalism is not just shooting itself in the foot.
It’s arming billionaires with machine guns, and all of them are collectively shooting it in the foot
The WSJ called it “a bet that gravity doesn’t apply to Elon Musk.” They’re not wrong.
Saurabh Parmar, Fractional CMO
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