My Thoughts on the SpaceX IPO
TLDR: SpaceX went public on Friday, rising to a $2.1 trillion valuation, the largest IPO in history. I’ve known Elon for 26+ years, have been an investor in his companies since the early days, and am proud to call him a friend. Below are the nine things I’m telling reporters, and the personal story underneath them.
1. SOLVING PROBLEMS, NOT PROFITS, MOTIVATE ELON
Forbes declared Elon the world’s first trillionaire. That’s the headline. It’s not the part that moves me, nor is it what motivates Elon.
People assume Elon is driven by wealth creation. He isn’t. He’s driven by solving the world’s biggest problems, and he is passionately, stubbornly committed to opening the space frontier. If there’s anyone alive who can do it, it’s him.
Here’s a story I don’t tell often. I knew Elon before he started SpaceX, back when we were just talking about rockets. Back then, the success rate for “rocket entrepreneurs” was abysmal, everybody was blowing theirs up. I tried to talk him out of building rockets and instead asked him to back the first XPRIZE. He didn’t listen to me, thank God. His first three launches, the Falcon 1, all failed. The company nearly died, there wasn’t money for another rocket, but there happened to be one left on the shelf. Eight weeks after the third failure, it reached orbit and saved the company. Most people would have quit after the second or third failure. That’s the man I’m proud to call a friend.
2. IT ISN’T A NORMAL TECH COMPANY. IT’S A CIVILIZATION BET.
People are trying to price this as a normal tech company. It isn’t one. It’s three converging businesses on one ticker: the launch industry, Starlink as the cash engine, and an AI frontier lab in xAI, all wrapped around a single thesis:
Humanity is becoming multiplanetary. When you invest in SpaceX, you’re not buying revenue. You’re buying the option on the off-Earth economy, which has a near-infinite addressable market.
And yes, I’ve heard the criticism all day. Buyers are paying a steep multiple for a launch business that, 22 years in, still loses money. Nvidia at peak enthusiasm traded near 25 times sales. By any normal yardstick, that’s expensive. But that math assumes the market is Earth. It isn’t. Everything we hold of value here, every metal, mineral, source of energy, and acre of real estate, exists in near-infinite quantities in space. You’re not overpaying for last year’s revenue. You’re underpricing a market that hasn’t been invented yet.
3. THE BEST ANALOGY: THE TRANSCONTINENTAL RAILROAD
I don’t think people know how to think about this company, so here’s the analogy I keep coming back to. The transcontinental railroads of the late 1800s. You could have valued the railroads on passengers and freight transported by the trains, and you’d have been wildly wrong. Their real value was in the towns they opened, the mines they reached, the farms they served. SpaceX is the railroad to orbit, and “the West” it’s opening isn’t a continent, it’s the solar system.
The fortunes won’t be made by the passengers. They’ll be made by the company that laid the track.
This is the greatest wealth-creation event in human history, and most people are looking at the wrong number.
4. THE KILLER APP: HUNDREDS OF GIGAWATTS OF AI IN ORBIT
Now layer the single most powerful technology humanity has ever invented on top of that railroad. SpaceX is going to be the hyperscaler delivering hundreds of gigawatts of AI compute to the planet, from orbit. A year ago nobody was talking about AI data centers in space. Today, Nvidia is building space-hardened chips for exactly that. Look at what Google just paid for a piece of Colossus-class compute, and what Anthropic is paying, then imagine 100 times that, solar-powered, in orbit.
Elon calls this moment a supersonic tsunami coming our way. The truth is it’s already here.
5. ON ELON, AND BETTING AGAINST HIM
I’ve watched people bet against Elon for 26 years. Every single time, they’ve been wrong. The best predictor of a person is their track record, and his is the most consistent I’ve ever seen, not always on time, but he has delivered on essentially everything he’s committed to. He has willed entire industries into existence. I don’t bet against the mission, and I don’t bet against him.
When Elon launched SpaceX and promised Falcon-9 reusability, the industrial-military complex laughed and gave it less than a 10% chance of working. Today SpaceX is valued at 25 x the entire U.S. launch industry and is providing 90%+ of the launches to orbit.
The best predictor of a person is their track record. Elon has willed entire industries into existence.
What I appreciate most isn’t the rockets. It’s the breadth. Name another human simultaneously building electric cars, humanoid robots, brain interfaces, tunnels, satellite internet for the planet, frontier AI, and a road to Mars. I can’t. The span of his vision goes beyond anyone I’ve ever met. This isn’t one man getting rich. It’s one man dragging a dozen industries forward at once.
6. THE TRILLIONAIRE HEADLINE IS THE DISTRACTION
The trillionaire story is the distraction. The real story is how many people Elon made wealthy: roughly 5,000 employees became millionaires and many hundreds became centimillionaires, people who built reusable rockets when the entire industry said it couldn’t be done.
This story is also about the hundreds or thousands of entrepreneurial companies which will now emerge and thrive, built on top of Starship dropping the launch cost 500-fold.
That’s what Abundance looks like: value created, not value extracted.
7. AM I STILL BUYING? YES.
People keep asking whether I’m taking the pop and getting out. The opposite. For the last decade, whenever I freed up capital from an exit, I put it into Bitcoin, and I still hold a significant position that I HODL.
Going forward, when I have free cash, I’m putting it into SpaceX. It’s a generational company. I’d expect a dip when locked-up shareholders are first able to sell and some take chips off the table, but I’m not in this for a quarterly bounce. I’m in it for the off-Earth economy.
8. THE MERGER IS COMING, AND SO IS THE $100 TRILLION COMPANY
I’ll say it plainly: I’m betting on a SpaceX-Tesla merger within the next year, 100%. There are too many reasons for Elon to do it, and now that SpaceX is publicly valued, combining them is far easier. Elon has never enjoyed running both; in the early days he wanted a CEO for Tesla so he could focus on SpaceX and never found the right person. In a combined company he’d hold majority decision-making and ownership, and frankly, you want Elon’s level of ambition running the whole thing. People hear a trillion-dollar valuation and ask if it can possibly go higher. I don’t think SpaceX will be the first $10 trillion company. I think it can be the first $100 trillion company. That’s the size of the market we’re talking about, hundreds of gigawatts of orbital AI today, AI factories on the Moon with mass drivers tomorrow. Every one of those ideas sounded insane right up until Elon did it.
9. THIS RESETS THE WHOLE AI CLASS OF 2026
Now, there’s a bigger ripple here, and it’s why every investor should watch even if they never buy a share. Wall Street is already looking past SpaceX toward OpenAI, Anthropic, and the next wave of AI listings. If SpaceX holds at these levels, every late-stage AI valuation gets marked up overnight. If it fades, the whole class reprices. This is a price-discovery moment for the entire AI economy, and honestly, nobody knows exactly which way it breaks. Neither do I.
Twenty-six years ago, a small group of space nerds believed humanity’s future was bigger than this planet. On Friday, the public finally got to buy a seat on that rocket. The nine-year-old in me couldn’t be more excited about what my (and your) kids and grandkids are about to inherit.
So strap in. Let’s see where it lands.
To a future of Abundance,
Peter
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Every time I read one of these pieces, I want to believe you. I do. I respect much of what Elon has attempted and achieved. But I can’t take words like yours seriously after DOGE. One man, failing so completely at making government more efficient, let alone making it work for society, and accomplishing nothing but tearing the social fabric here on Earth. That is not someone I want holding monopoly power over space.
If I believed he understood how to help humanity, I’d probably still support him. But listen to his children and his ex-wives. Look at how callously he gutted entire frontiers of science with needless funding cuts. That is not someone in it for the good of the many over the good of the one anymore.
There’s a great movie about all this. You may have heard of it. It’s called Wall-E, where greed and an insane concentration of wealth lead directly to a ruined Earth.
Absolutely fantastic article, Peter. Thank you! We will remember this era as Elonzoic. He is literally creating humanity’s optimistic future in real time. We are lucky to be alive at this time.