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Welcome back to Receipts. This week’s edition is about the SpaceX IPO, which is slated to break all sorts of records next week and make Elon Musk the world’s first trillionaire. That’s happening in large part because a lot of 401(k)s will soon be forced to buy it, at what certainly seems like an inflated price.
And look, maybe someday it will pay off! That would be nice. But in the meantime the company is losing billions and somehow Musk keeps failing upward.
Do you have a more optimistic view of Musk’s prospects for wildly profitable space travel? Let me know in the comments. In the meantime, if you want to support a mission that is more earthbound and not tied to a MAGA oligarch, consider investing in a Bulwark+ membership:
–Catherine
Congrats. You’re About to Unwittingly Make Elon Musk a Trillionaire.
SpaceX is IPOing next week. And there’s a good chance you’re gonna own a portion of it—whether you like it or not.
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IF YOU’RE READING THIS, you might be about to help make Elon Musk the world’s first trillionaire.
If so, you’ll also be risking your retirement savings while simultaneously bailing out X and Cybertrucks.
And to top it off: You have pretty much no say in the matter.
That’s because Musk’s SpaceX is IPOing next week, and it’s getting special treatment that allows it to enter many of the major stock indices without meeting the usual requirements to do so. What that means is that if you hold an index fund—which you probably do, if you have a 401(k)—you may be forced to transfer some of your wealth to this money-losing rocket company and, by extension, its megalomaniacal CEO. And you won’t really be able to complain if he screws up.
Let’s talk through how we’re privatizing gains for Musk and socializing the costs for the rest of us.
The rocket stock
SpaceX, the space-travel-but-actually-AI company, will IPO next week at a total valuation of $1.77 trillion. That would make it the largest IPO on record. It’s being valued this high despite the fact that the company loses massive amounts of money—and when I say massive, I mean massive. It lost $4.9 billion in 2025, and almost that much in the first quarter of 2026 alone. The company’s prospectus has a lot of pretty photos of rockets, and not much to show in profits.
Of course, it’s not unheard of for a company to go public before it starts turning a profit, particularly in tech.¹ When that’s the case, though, investors often benchmark value against revenues.
But even by that alternative metric, SpaceX’s numbers are kind of insane.
The typical tech firm might trade at 5 to 10 times its revenue. An exceptionally fast-growth AI-related company (like Nvidia) may trade closer to 20 times revenue. But in the case of SpaceX, the multiple will be about 95.²
In essence, the IPO pricing assumes unprecedented, parabolic growth for SpaceX in the years ahead. Put another way, the rocket-ship company needs rocket-fueled profits for any of these numbers to make any sense.
That’s a risk for the casual investor. But it’s terrific news for Musk. He is already the world’s richest man, and now, since he owns roughly half of SpaceX stock, the enormous valuation of the IPO should, ahem, rocket him into the four-comma club.
A Russian nesting-doll of bailouts
With this IPO, Musk also gets bailed out of some of his most embarrassing failures, which he’s buried under SpaceX’s froth.
For instance, X, the social-media platform formerly known as Twitter, got shoved into SpaceX. So if you buy the shiny new spaceship company, you’re also buying a piece of Musk’s decrepit MAGA playground.
Same goes for other Musk screwups.
For example, when no one wanted to buy the ugly Cybertrucks whose wheels³ kept falling off, Musk-controlled Tesla found a willing customer in Musk-controlled SpaceX. SpaceX purchased nearly one out of every five Cybertrucks registered in the last quarter of 2025—meaning Musk booked around $100 million in Tesla revenue by selling trucks to his other companies.
The Boring Company, yet another Musk-controlled firm, is also being paid to do construction work for SpaceX.
In general, Musk has a tendency to take one business he controls and overspend to buy things from other businesses he controls. It’s kind of like a Ponzi scheme, except every subsequent customer is yet another Elon Musk company.
How is all this possible? Why are people still giving this guy money, given these crazy valuations? There are three basic answers: