Elon Musk wants to take SpaceX public -- and he's asking investors to believe the rocket and AI company is worth almost $1.75 trillion.
On Wall Street, not everyone is convinced.
What does that number actually mean? SpaceX made $18.5 billion in sales last year. Musk is asking investors to value the company at nearly 100 times that.
To put it another way: even Apple, one of the most valuable companies on Earth, is worth about 11 times its annual revenue, as measured by market capitalization. Nvidia, the darling of the AI revolution, is worth 25 times.
The upcoming IPO -- short for initial public offering, when a private company sells shares to the public for the first time -- could be one of the biggest in history.
Ahead of the Wall Street liftoff, expected in mid-June, SpaceX backers say the company isn't just a rocket business but rather the gatekeeper to space itself.
"SpaceX controls the rails and controls access to orbit," said Chad Anderson, CEO of Space Capital, an investment firm that already owns a stake in SpaceX.
He argues we are only at the beginning of a decades-long space infrastructure boom worth hundreds of billions of dollars, from replacing aging satellites to building data centers in orbit.
The company's satellite internet service, Starlink, is already generating most of SpaceX's revenue and profit.
"If they can be the low-cost provider of Internet access to lots of people around the world, that can be an enormous source of revenue and profits," said Jay Ritter, an IPO expert at the University of Florida.
Source: Drudge Report
