Elon Musk’s SpaceX has unveiled a particularly ambitious IPO prospectus

The official documents show that the space giant has actually become a huge bet on artificial intelligence. Musk has flagged this technology as the company’s biggest potential market, estimated at around $26.5 trillion – an amount that dwarfs the revenue from the Starlink satellite internet service. Last year alone, the company spent about $13 billion on artificial intelligence hardware, which led to an operating loss of $6.4 billion in that segment and dragged the company as a whole into a net loss, despite an operating profit of $4.4 billion from Starlink. However, the company was able to commercialize its excess computing: the artificial intelligence giant Anthropic will pay SpaceX about $15 billion a year for leasing space in its data centers.

In the long term, SpaceX’s plan is to move AI computing workloads into space, using a vast array of orbital data centers that will be powered by solar energy and cooled by the vacuum of space. To this end, the company relies on the success of its giant Starship spacecraft.

If the offering reaches the expected target value of $1.75 trillion, Musk – who owns about 41% of the company’s shares – could see the value of his holdings jump to about $700 billion, which would make him the world’s first trillionaire. To secure his position, the company’s board of directors granted him shares with preferred voting power, giving him control of 93.6% of the voting votes of the holders of these shares, making his removal completely impossible. On the other hand, the prospectus includes 37 pages of risk warnings, ranging from cosmic radiation and space debris, to regulatory investigations concerning offensive content on the X social network he owns, which has been merged into the activity. The investment bank Goldman Sachs was chosen to lead the historic issue.