The SpaceX IPO That Could Land in Your 401(k)

Elon Musk said for years he wasn't going to take SpaceX public. Then came the reported proposed merger with xAI — still discussed, not completed as of this writing — and suddenly tens of billions of dollars in new capital became less of a nice-to-have and more of a structural necessity. So here we are: SpaceX is reportedly preparing for what Bloomberg describes as the largest IPO in history, targeting a raise of up to $75 billion at a projected valuation approaching $2 trillion.

I cover Main Street. I cover the businesses where the owner is also the bookkeeper, the janitor, and the person who answers the phone at 7 p.m. on a Friday. The SpaceX IPO is not, on its face, a Main Street story.

Except it might become one — whether Main Street asked for it or not.

What SpaceX Actually Is Right Now

Before we get to the financial architecture, it's worth being concrete about what SpaceX actually does, because the gap between the dream and the day job matters here.

The day job is Starlink. Picture a small-town hardware store owner in rural Montana — the kind of county where the nearest broadband provider decided the buildout cost wasn't worth it. Before Starlink, that owner was running her inventory system off a hotspot that dropped every time it rained. Now she has a satellite dish the size of a pizza box on her roof and a connection fast enough to run her point-of-sale system, her supplier portal, and her daughter's homework simultaneously. That's what Starlink is, in human terms: it's internet delivered by a constellation of thousands of small satellites orbiting low enough to cut the lag that made older satellite internet nearly unusable. Farmers checking weather models in real time. Clinics in underserved counties transmitting patient records. School buses in dead zones running Wi-Fi for kids on long rides home. The company has built something genuinely useful to people that major carriers wrote off as unprofitable to reach.

That business is real, and it's big. SpaceX has also built a rocket transportation operation — the one that's been flying cargo and crew to the International Space Station, that's made it relatively routine to watch a booster land itself back on a pad.

But here's the thing about the $2 trillion valuation: Starlink and the rockets together don't come close to justifying it. According to Bloomberg's reporting on a 277-page SEC filing — and I need to be direct with you here: because SpaceX has been private, none of these figures have been independently verified, and no public S-1 has been released as of this writing, so treat every number I'm about to cite as Bloomberg's characterization of an unaudited private document — the company apparently grew revenue from roughly $14 billion to $18.5 billion between 2024 and 2025, with projections toward $22 to $24 billion. Also per that filing, as Bloomberg reports it: a profit of $791 million in 2023 swung to a net loss of $4.94 billion in 2025. All of it — the revenue, the profit, the loss — carries the same asterisk. You are taking the company's word for it, filtered through Bloomberg's reporting, until an audited public filing says otherwise.

Even granting those numbers as accurate, investors are reportedly pricing SpaceX at roughly 87 times annual revenue. Tesla and Nvidia, both of which trade at valuations that make plenty of analysts nervous, sit at around 15 times. The gap isn't a rounding error. It's the price of everything SpaceX hasn't built yet: orbital data centers, AI infrastructure running in space, and yes, Mars.

The Founder and the Timeline

There's a version of this story where the valuation makes a certain kind of sense. Musk has, in fact, done things that weren't supposed to be possible. Reusable orbital rockets. A private company regularly launching humans to the space station. A satellite internet network with meaningful adoption. The man has a track record of turning "that's not feasible" into "well, it took longer than he said, but okay." Investors pricing in the possibility that he's going to do it again, even on a longer timeline than promised, is not irrational on its face.

"What looks like plausible ambition may end up being completely baseless hope," one analyst noted in Bloomberg's video. Both halves of that sentence are doing real work. The ambition is plausible. The hope may be baseless. The honest answer is that nobody knows which one it is yet, including Musk.

What the IPO also does, though, is introduce a tension that the private SpaceX never had to manage. Space development runs on a different clock than a quarterly earnings call. You blow up a rocket to learn why it blew up. You build something that fails three times before it works. That's not a bug in the process — it's the process. Public shareholders, by and large, are not built for that relationship. "When you shift to a public company, your focus becomes more on short-term profits," Bloomberg's analysts noted. "When it comes to space, there's a very long lead time of development." Publicly accountable, quarterly scrutinized, Mars-colonizing SpaceX is a different animal than the one that got here. Whether it's a better or worse animal for the mission is a genuine open question.

Your 401(k) Doesn't Get a Vote

Here's where I have to talk to you directly, because this is the part of the story that I keep coming back to.

When a reader calls me — and they do call, especially after something goes sideways in their retirement account — they're usually not angry about a decision they made. They're angry about a decision that got made for them. They didn't buy a stock. They bought a target-date fund, or a broad index ETF, because that's what the conventional wisdom told them to do for thirty years. And then one day they find out they're holding something they'd never have chosen.

That's the scenario Bloomberg is describing with SpaceX's anticipated inclusion in the NASDAQ 100. Here's what the NASDAQ 100 is, simply: it's a list of the 100 largest non-financial companies trading on the NASDAQ exchange. Hundreds of billions of dollars in index funds and ETFs — including the widely-held Invesco QQQ — automatically buy every stock on that list, in proportion to its size. If you own QQQ in your 401(k), you own a piece of every company in the NASDAQ 100. You didn't pick them. The index did.

Historically, getting onto that index took time. The old process worked roughly like this: you go public, you spend a period — sometimes described as a "seasoning period" in market parlance — operating as a public company. During that window, the market gets a look at you. Your financials get audited. Your stock finds a real price through actual trading, not just the price a private fundraising round said you were worth. You prove you can survive the scrutiny before you get automatic access to every passive investor in America. Think of it like a probationary period at a new job: you don't get the full benefits package on day one.

Bloomberg reports that NASDAQ has modified its rules to allow faster inclusion for companies that are already large when they go public — describing a compressed timeline of roughly three months rather than the prior standard. The specific rule change, the authority under which it was made, and its precise effective date are not detailed in Bloomberg's reporting as I've seen it. I'm relying on Bloomberg's characterization here, and I want to be straight with you about that, because what I'm about to say depends on it being accurate: if SpaceX goes public and lands in the NASDAQ 100 quickly, millions of Americans in index funds will own a piece of a company valued at 87 times its revenue, with a net loss that Bloomberg reports at nearly $5 billion in its most recent year, and whose core growth strategy depends on technology that has, on occasion, exploded on the launchpad.

They won't have been asked. The index inclusion happens automatically. Their fund buys it because the fund tracks the index.

"Once the company is included in the NASDAQ 100, any investors who are buying the QQQ will by definition be investing their hard-earned money into SpaceX regardless of the valuation," as one analyst put it in Bloomberg's video.

I'm not saying SpaceX is a bad investment. I genuinely don't know. Nobody does yet. What bothers me is the "regardless of the valuation" part. There's a real difference between choosing to make a speculative bet with money you can afford to lose, and having that bet made on your behalf inside a retirement account you've been told is the safe, boring, conventional choice.

If you want to bet that Musk figures out the Mars colony and the orbital data centers and the AI infrastructure in orbit, and that the stock goes from a trillion to two, that's a coherent position. Plenty of smart people are willing to make it. The people making it on purpose, with their eyes on what they're buying — I understand that bet completely.

The question I keep sitting with is about everyone else: the school bus driver in that rural county who got Starlink internet, who also happens to have a 401(k) in a NASDAQ index fund, who has no idea that the company providing her town's internet is about to become a mandatory holding in her retirement account at 87 times revenue.

She didn't get a vote on that. And the rules that would have given the market time to price SpaceX before her money went in — those rules, Bloomberg reports, are being rewritten right now, specifically for companies this size.

SpaceX may deliver everything it's promised. The more pressing question for most investors isn't whether Musk gets to Mars. It's whether the people who never meant to fund the trip are going to be okay.

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Dorothy "Dot" Williams covers small business and Main Street economics for Buzzrag.