SpaceX may finally be ready to take off. Not another batch of Starlink or a test of Starship – a real debut on the public markets with timing and price.
Elon Musk's company has, according to “Information”has been advising investors to pursue a potential IPO in the second half of 2026—all the while, Chief Financial Officer Bret Johnsen says the company is planning a secondary share sale that would value the business at about $800 billion, roughly double the price buyers agreed to in a tender earlier this year. according to the Wall Street Journal. Bloomberg, however, says some of these insider sales could actually end at around $300 per share, which rules out closer to $560 billionmaking this about both the negotiating position and the deal made.
The scenario was discussed at a Starbase board meeting in Texas, but this is still the territory of terms, not prospectuses, and final plans will depend on how many sellers and buyers actually show up.
SpaceX has made a point of holding semi-regular tenders so employees and early backers can turn paper wealth into real money without waiting for a listing. Every six months or so, the company does some version of insider selling, a pressure valve of sorts for the cap table that continues to inflate privately.
The $800 billion target takes SpaceX out of the $250 billion to $400 billion range where it has traded privately and drops it into mega-cap territory, shoulder to shoulder with companies that are required by law to publish audited financial statements every quarter. The move would also push SpaceX past OpenAI's recent $500 billion valuation and give it back the (unofficial) crown of the world's most valuable startup, taking the title from Musk's rival, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
The IPO sketch, based on an estimated $800 billion, is ambitious. For years, the thinking in banking circles was that Starlink would come out on top, offering a tidy satellite Internet story while the rocket business remained private. The latest plan shown to investors points to a different path: a combined listing that bundles rockets, Starlink, government contracts and everything else into a single “space infrastructure” pitch and asks public markets to price that package at multiples of SpaceX's scale.
Musk said the space business will determine when its growth is “smooth and predictable.” Starlink comes as close to that description as possible; Analysts now estimate its annual sales at about $12 billion from millions of subscribers paying for broadband in war zones, farm fields, cruise ships and places land-based telecommunications never bothers to reach. Internally and on his social media site X, Musk has boasted that SpaceX's commercial space revenues now rival or exceed what NASA spends on comparable launches and services. Musk has said his company will have revenue of about $15.5 billion in 2025, and the frequency of launches is already making the nation's space programs look stunted.
At Tesla's annual meeting last month, Musk told shareholders that “at some point SpaceX has to become a public company” and said he was looking for a way for Tesla holders to own SpaceX stock. Between that line, the $800 billion dress rehearsal and the end-2026 target, investors now have more than rumors to base their models on – even if there's still no S-1, no exchange chosen and a slew of regulatory and policy challenges ahead for the missile-telecom hybrid that's also a key U.S. defense contractor. A lot could happen in the markets before the end of 2026. Given SpaceX's ongoing secondary sales, it could be as much about planting a flag on an $800 billion hill as it is about liquidity.
Now SpaceX is essentially asking late-stage investors to swallow another take in less than six months – pricing in a future where Starship is operational, Starlink is minting money at the telecom level, and governments continue to write very large checks for launch and space infrastructure. The company may finally be ready to issue shares; the real question is whether public investors are willing to invest in this situation.
