SpaceX has taken the rare step of filing for an initial public offering that could rewrite Wall Street history, revealing for the first time the full extent of its financials and Elon Musk’s intertwined empire. The S-1 prospectus, published this week, shows a company that in 2025 generated $18.5 billion in revenue—largely from its Starlink satellite internet division—yet posted a net loss of nearly $5 billion. The document, running to over 200,000 words, sets the stage for what analysts in London describe as a “once-in-a-generation” market event, with expectations that SpaceX could raise more than $80 billion, surpassing all previous IPO records.

Hidden within the filing is a portrait of Musk’s sprawling business network. The aerospace giant spent hundreds of millions of dollars on products from Tesla last year, including $697 million in Megapack batteries and $131 million in Cybertrucks, purchases that SpaceX acknowledges as “related party transactions.” The consolidation of xAI into SpaceX earlier this year further blurs the lines: the merged entity is now burning cash on artificial intelligence and planning to build data centres in orbit. Viewed from Washington, these self-dealing ties raise corporate governance eyebrows, though the prospectus insists they ultimately benefit all shareholders.

The most audacious component of the filing is Musk’s new compensation package. The board has granted him one billion restricted Class B shares—on top of his existing five billion—but with an extraordinary condition: he will only receive them once one million people have taken up permanent residence on Mars. The package, potentially worth hundreds of billions at the expected $1.75 trillion valuation, ties Musk’s personal fortune directly to his most far-flung ambition. “I want to wake up and think the future will be wonderful,” Musk writes in the prospectus’s preamble, framing the IPO as a bet on civilisation’s expansion into space.

The offering also illuminated Musk’s personal leverage. The Bloomberg Billionaires Index had previously assumed that nearly 60% of his SpaceX stake was pledged as collateral for loans, creating a $45 billion liability. The S-1, however, reveals that less than 0.3% of his shares are actually encumbered, prompting Bloomberg to remove that liability and sending Musk’s estimated net worth to a record $722 billion. Analysts in Frankfurt note that the IPO will make the world’s richest man essentially untouchable—and that his power as “Technoking” of Tesla and CEO of SpaceX, now a public company with a dual-class control structure, could present challenges for regulators and minority investors.

Whether SpaceX’s listing will revive the broader IPO market is another question. The company is so large and idiosyncratic—with its mix of sci-fi ambition and AI infrastructure—that it offers little guidance for normal candidates. The prospectus warns of “conflicts of interest” and ongoing losses, but the narrative of Mars colonisation, asteroid mining, and space-based data centres has already captivated retail investors. For now, the market seems willing to buy into the vision. The real test will come when the first quarterly results as a public company land—and the countdown to one million Martians begins.