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SpaceX has now priced, and the largest IPO in history is no longer hypothetical. The offering has been set, unusually early, at $135 per share, which values the equity at roughly $1.8 trillion, with a final price expected Thursday and the listing scheduled for Friday, June 12. One thing should be clear at the outset: I have the highest respect for Elon Musk as an entrepreneur; on numerous occasions he has achieved the seemingly impossible. His companies have propelled humanity forward and promise to do so in the future.
I want to be careful about what I am and am not saying. I have no quarrel with what SpaceX might be worth a decade from now; for all I know the answer is enormous. The question that matters for anyone buying on the first day is what the company is worth today, on the strength of its actual financials, its actual markets, and what it actually does. Measured that way, $1.8 trillion reads less like a valuation than like a number the offering has manufactured, and a great deal of machinery has been assembled to bring retail investors into it at the open. Three pieces we are featuring in this week’s deck sharpened how I am thinking about the week ahead, and none of them requires a view on Mars or artificial general intelligence to be useful.
The first piece, a thought exercise entitled The Stock Market Crash of 2027 by James Emanuel, Mauricio Heck, and Hugo Navarro, presents a structural argument rather than a forecast. Three mega-IPOs, SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic, are arriving inside roughly six months and together reaching toward $4 trillion or more, with Anthropic’s recent private round alone near $1 trillion. The dollars to absorb that supply have to come from somewhere, and the likeliest source is investors trimming the mega-cap technology positions they already hold, since these listings sit in the same bucket. In a market this concentrated in a handful of technology names, that rotation could pull the broad indices down on its own.
Two design features make the setup more fragile still. SpaceX is bringing only a small fraction of its implied value to market at the start, reportedly 3% to 5% of the equity, which manufactures the scarcity needed to support a price like this in the first place. And the lock-up is not a single 180-day cliff but a staggered series of releases, so across the back half of the year the float swells in tranches and the early scarcity reverses into a flood. The historical rhymes are not comforting. Facebook fell by roughly half after its 2012 lock-up rolled off, and the dot-com unwind was a rolling sequence of expirations rather than a single break. The investors most exposed to that sequence are the ones buying at the open, who pay the engineered price and then inherit the unlock calendar.
The second piece I include with real respect, and with a disagreement I want to state carefully. Aswath Damodaran revisited his SpaceX valuation once the prospectus was public and arrived at an equity value of about $1.3 trillion, roughly $500 billion, or close to 30%, below the $135 offering. Damodaran is the dean of valuation, and his practice of publishing his full work, spreadsheet included, for anyone to inspect and challenge is a genuine service to the investing community. On the headline point he and I do not actually disagree: even his estimate, which already leans on generous assumptions about the next decade, still lands well below the offering price, which is another way of saying there is no margin of safety for an IPO buyer.
Where I hesitate to follow is on the prior question, whether a business like this can be valued today with that degree of precision at all. The model is anchored on revenue figures for 2036 and on operating margins assumed for businesses, the AI line above all, that have very little public track record in the very markets said to make up most of the company’s opportunity. Damodaran himself flags the prospectus’s claim of a $28 trillion total addressable market, $26 trillion of it in AI, as closer to fantasy than forecast; he then doubles his own AI revenue target, to $160 billion, while trimming the assumed AI operating margin from 45% to 25%, and that single pair of choices moves the answer by a wide margin. When inputs this distant and this uncertain carry most of the result, my own instinct is that the honest output is a range too wide to anchor a decision rather than a single figure. None of this is a criticism of his rigor, which is beyond question; it is a difference about how much any method, however careful, can ask of facts this thin. SpaceX plainly contains valuable businesses. The question is the price today, and on that, his figure and my skepticism point in the same direction.
The third piece, from Phil Bak, turns to the index providers, and it is the one that genuinely encouraged me. Under heavy pressure to fast-track these mega-IPOs into their benchmarks from day one, several providers, including Nasdaq and FTSE Russell, moved to accommodate. S&P Dow Jones did not. It held to its twelve-month seasoning requirement and its GAAP profitability requirement and declined to make an exception for size, on the principle that financial viability, seasoning, and float standards should not be waived “solely based on market capitalization.” For a company that lost roughly $5 billion last year, that means S&P 500 funds will not be forced to buy SpaceX at any price for a long time. I do not think the stakes here are small.
Bending the rules to pull an unseasoned, loss-making company into the major indices at a nosebleed valuation would hand the bill to the passive investors least able to absorb it, retirees among them, who never chose the position. That is an abdication of the duty those benchmarks owe the people who entrust them with their savings. S&P is the adult in the room, and if it holds the line it is plainly acting in investors’ interest. One caveat, drawn from the first piece: the Nasdaq-100 has moved the other way, reweighting low-float names at three times their float and dropping the minimum-float rule that would have kept SpaceX out, so the relief is real for S&P 500 holders and only partial for those who own the Nasdaq-100.
None of this is a prediction that the week ends badly. It may be the start of real volatility, or it may not, and we will know more in a few days. What I do believe is that the moment calls for minding the downside with the same care most investors have lately reserved for the upside. The encouraging part is that this does not require sitting on the sidelines. There are still corners of the market that are reasonably priced, and a few that are outright cheap, so it remains possible to stay fully invested while stepping well clear of the excess on display in this offering. We will reconvene next Monday, when much of this should be clearer. This week’s deck follows.
Feedback on the Monday Morning Briefing
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A few words on the format
The Briefing is designed to answer a deceptively simple question. If you were sitting down before the weekly market open, as an investor rather than a trader, what would you want in front of you?
Each week, the Briefing walks through four parts.
Weekly Review & Outlook covers equity performance, sector moves, the earnings just reported, and the earnings coming up, alongside curated editorial highlights from our Weekly Inspiration newsletter.
Idea Generation surfaces candidates from screens we run: biggest decliners, names near 52-week lows, low multiples, high FCF yields, spinoffs, activist situations, buybacks, short interest, and more.
Market Valuation & Positioning steps back to the index level: the Buffett Indicator, aggregate multiples versus history, S&P 500 concentration, equal-weight versus cap-weight, and long-run factor returns.
Macro & Fixed Income rounds out the picture with rates, credit spreads, the Fed balance sheet, the dollar, labor, regional PMIs, and housing.
The new issue is attached below. We welcome your suggestions and ideas as we refine the format week to week.
