SpaceX: May 2026 News

May was the month when years of anticipation finally began to take shape as concrete dates, numbers, and events. The IPO is no longer an abstraction.

SpaceX is an important part of the Raison portfolio: we invested in the company back in 2019. Since then, it has grown from a private launch operator into a global infrastructure giant, and going public is the logical culmination of that transformation.

S-1: financials revealed for the first time

On May 20, SpaceX publicly disclosed its financial performance for the first time in its IPO prospectus. NYT broke down the key numbers:

• 2025 revenue — $18.7 billion, up 33% year over year.
• Starlink: 10.3 million subscribers at the end of March — double the figure a year earlier. Segment revenue up 49%, operating income $4.4 billion.
• SpaceX accounts for roughly 80% of all payload mass delivered to orbit.
• Musk owns around 50% of shares and controls more than 85% of votes through a class of super-voting stock.
• At the current valuation of $1.25 trillion, Musk's stake is worth over $635 billion — and that's before the IPO.

The company is in an active investment phase: capital expenditures have grown to $20.7 billion as it scales out AI infrastructure. That is weighing on financial results, but Starlink continues to generate enough to fund the still-unprofitable segments. The prospectus makes no attempt to hide the company's ambitions: alongside the moonshots, there are concrete plans to expand its existing businesses.

IPO date and exchange

According to WSJ and CoinDesk, the final offering price will be set on June 11, with trading on Nasdaq beginning June 12. The roadshow, a series of meetings between management and prospective investors, kicks off on June 4.

The IPO is moving faster than originally planned: the SEC completed its review ahead of schedule, allowing the company to accelerate its timeline by nearly a month. Choosing Nasdaq also appears to be a deliberate strategic move — the exchange enables faster inclusion in the Nasdaq-100 index.

SpaceX is looking to raise around $75 billion at a $1.75 trillion valuation. If the listing goes as planned, it will be the largest IPO in history. For context: Saudi Aramco raised $29 billion in 2019.

Preparing shares for mass demand

Shareholders approved a 5-for-1 stock split: each existing share becomes five new ones. The total value of assets stays the same, while the price per share drops to $105.32. The goal is straightforward — make shares more accessible to a broader pool of investors ahead of the listing.

BlackRock could become an anchor investor

According to Reuters, BlackRock is considering a roughly $10 billion investment as part of the IPO — about one-seventh of the total amount SpaceX plans to raise. BlackRock is one of Wall Street's biggest players and the world's largest asset manager. Participation at that scale significantly raises the odds of a successful listing and sets the tone for other institutional investors.

The IPO will be more accessible to retail investors

Retail investors typically receive a small slice of any IPO and often buy shares only after trading begins — sometimes at significantly higher prices. SpaceX is changing that dynamic: a portion of shares will be sold directly through Robinhood, Fidelity, and Charles Schwab at the same IPO price and at the same time as institutional investors.

Access will still be limited — each platform sets its own terms, and demand will likely far exceed supply. But the principle of equal pricing for retail investors is rare at this scale.

Goldman Sachs lands the lead role

According to Yahoo Finance, Goldman Sachs will serve as the lead underwriter — the most prestigious position in any offering. The bank is responsible for building the order book from institutional investors, preparing SEC filings, and allocating shares on day one.

Morgan Stanley oversees post-listing price stabilization and manages the retail investor allocation through E-Trade, Robinhood, Fidelity, Charles Schwab, and SoFi. A total of 23 banks are involved, with total fees estimated by Yahoo Finance at over $1 billion.

SpaceX and Google: data centers in orbit

After building two large data centers in Tennessee, SpaceX signed a deal with Anthropic to lease computing capacity for $1.25 billion per month.

Now, according to Bloomberg, Google is in talks with SpaceX about the next step — launching orbital data centers. The IPO prospectus already identifies space-based AI infrastructure as a future revenue source, with the company estimating the AI applications market at $22.6 trillion.

Google's interest moves this idea from science fiction to a potential new market.

SpaceX holds $1.3 billion in Bitcoin

The IPO filing revealed an unexpected detail: according to CoinDesk, SpaceX held 18,712 bitcoin on its balance sheet at the end of Q1, with a fair value of $1.29 billion. That puts SpaceX alongside Tesla (11,509 BTC) and makes this the first major IPO of a company with significant bitcoin reserves disclosed under fair-value accounting standards.

For the crypto industry, this IPO brings two pieces of news. The good one: Bitcoin on a public company's balance sheet signals market maturity — cryptocurrency is becoming a legitimate instrument in corporate finance. The less good one: a wave of mega-IPOs will inevitably pull capital away from risk-on assets. That said, the effect is unlikely to be dramatic — SpaceX, Anthropic, and OpenAI are primarily competing for institutional and pension fund money, not crypto.

European competitors take notice

WSJ noted a rally in European space-company stocks as SpaceX's IPO approaches. An indirect but telling signal: markets reprice the entire sector when the leader goes public.

Starship V3: SpaceX's most powerful launch yet

On May 22, SpaceX launched Starship V3 — the most powerful rocket ever built. The flight wasn't perfect: the Super Heavy booster was lost after its engines failed to relight for the return burn, and one of Starship's six Raptor engines shut down during ascent.

Even so, the mission completed its key objectives: Starship deployed 20 Starlink satellite simulators into orbit and performed a controlled splashdown simulation in the Indian Ocean about an hour after liftoff.

The launch happened just two days after the IPO prospectus was published. As Kathleen Curlee, a research analyst at Georgetown University's Center for Security and Emerging Technology, put it:

Another meaningful step forward in SpaceX's broader strategy of building the launch capacity needed to support the company's expanding ambitions in space.