Of all the extraordinary things about the SpaceX IPO, the most extraordinary might be this: it is impossible to tell what this company will be 10, five or even two years from now. And, to judge from the way its share sale has been conducted, that is just the way Elon Musk wants it.
SpaceX confirmed on Wednesday that it hopes to secure a valuation of $1.78tn, something that would make it the world’s seventh most valuable company. How exactly it plans to support that gargantuan valuation is not obvious. The latest version of SpaceX dates back only to February of this year. That is when Musk merged it with xAI, an unexpected deal that, out of the blue, made AI its most important business.
SpaceX had always listed its main ambition as making humans a multi-planetary species, with a new home on Mars. Now AI dominates its plans (xAI accounted for more than three quarters of capital spending in the first quarter) and its business opportunities (93 per cent of its addressable markets are said to revolve around AI). SpaceX is now overwhelmingly an AI play.