SpaceX’s first employee, Tom Mueller, thinks the historic IPO is just the beginning

SpaceX is reportedly targeting a $75 billion IPO at $135 per share, implying a roughly $1.75 trillion valuation. The company posted $18.67 billion in 2025 revenue but a $4.9 billion net loss, alongside $20.7 billion in capital expenditures tied largely to AI development. The piece frames the listing as a validation of the space sector and a potential catalyst for venture secondaries, though it is still largely commentary rather than hard market-moving news.

Analysis

The first-order read is not “Space IPO good,” but that public-market discipline converts a deeply optional capex story into a timing story. That matters because the market will stop underwriting perpetual front-loading and start marking every slip against a hard liquidity/earnings path; the initial multiple can remain extreme, but the volatility regime should widen materially as soon as guidance becomes a tradable input. In other words, the largest impact is likely not on day one price discovery, but on the market’s willingness to finance adjacent space bets that depend on the same “private valuation forever” assumption.

The second-order beneficiary is the launch-and-in-space-services stack, not the core rocket manufacturer. If the market accepts space-based compute as a real capex theme, the scarce assets become orbital transfer, servicing, power, thermal management, and on-orbit logistics—areas where smaller pure-plays can rerate faster than the headline IPO. That creates a potential wedge: SpaceX may absorb the volatility, while vendors and competitors with nearer-term revenue conversion get the multiple expansion.

A key contrarian risk is that the story conflates technical feasibility with economic feasibility. Space compute can be impressive and still remain subscale if terrestrial AI inference keeps getting cheaper on power-optimized data centers; if that happens, the valuation narrative compresses sharply over the next 6–18 months. The other hazard is governance: once public, every delay becomes litigable by expectations, and any launch anomaly or schedule slip can trigger a cascading re-rate across the private secondaries complex.

For TSLA, the linkage is indirect but real: a successful SpaceX tape can improve investor tolerance for long-duration Musk optionality, while a post-IPO de-rating would do the opposite. The cleanest setup is to treat the IPO as a sentiment catalyst rather than a fundamental read-through for EV demand; the P&L impact is more likely through multiple expansion/contraction than through near-term earnings revisions.

Key Decisions for Investors

• Long short-duration volatility in the SpaceX-related ecosystem where available; use the first 1-3 post-IPO trading sessions to fade oversized opening enthusiasm if implied funding assumptions outrun visible cash generation. Risk/reward favors selling strength into the initial repricing rather than chasing the open.
• Overweight orbit-logistics and space-infrastructure names versus launch-heavy exposure for the next 6-12 months; the market will pay up for nearer-term revenue conversion if SpaceX legitimizes the category. Favor businesses with contracted backlog and less execution binary.
• For TSLA, avoid adding simply on the SpaceX IPO headline; instead consider a tactical TSLA call spread only if the IPO is received as a broad Musk-platform validation and the stock confirms with volume over 2-4 weeks. Otherwise, the read-through is too indirect to justify fresh risk.
• Watch private-market secondaries/VC SPV exposure closely over the next 30-90 days; if IPO pricing comes in below euphoric marks, expect forced mark-downs and potential liquidity pressure. That would be a catalyst to underwrite discounts in later-stage private tech fund marks more conservatively.
• If SpaceX trades as a pure AI-compute proxy, consider a pair trade: long a profitable AI infrastructure enabler, short the most richly valued terrestrial compute beneficiary most vulnerable to a 'space compute is optional' reversal over 3-6 months. This isolates the valuation narrative from the underlying AI capex cycle.