Elon Musk's space company SpaceX has entered the final countdown toward what would be the largest initial public offering (IPO) in history. Major foreign media outlets reported in unison that SpaceX recently filed confidential paperwork with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for listing procedures.
According to major foreign media including Bloomberg and the Financial Times (FT) on the 1st (local time), SpaceX is targeting a corporations valuation of about $1.75 trillion (about 2,660 trillion won) in the IPO. That is a nearly 20-fold surge from its valuation at the end of 2022 ($90 billion). In the U.S. stock market, only the so-called "Big Five" tech corporations—Nvidia, Apple and Microsoft—are valued higher than SpaceX.
The market expects SpaceX to raise at least $75 billion (about 114 trillion won) through the listing. That would be an overwhelming scale more than double the all-time IPO record ($29 billion) set by Saudi Arabia's state-owned oil corporations Aramco in 2019. FT said June, when Musk's 55th birthday coincides with a rare planetary alignment, is the leading candidate for the listing date.
Ahead of the listing, the U.S. Nasdaq took the unusual step of revising its rules in a bid to "court Musk." According to the FT, Nasdaq recently deleted the existing "public offering of 10% or more of shares" requirement so that large new listings can be added to the index immediately. It also announced it would shorten the waiting period for inclusion in the large-cap Nasdaq-100 index from the previous three months to 15 days after the start of trading. This opens the possibility that SpaceX, which plans to list less than 5% of its total equity, could be included in the Nasdaq-100 within 15 days of listing.
Thanks to this rule, SpaceX will be able to absorb, intact, $520 billion in passive funds that track the Nasdaq-100 immediately after listing. The market views this as such a drastic step that criticism has emerged calling it a "preferential" rule change by Nasdaq for a specific corporations.
Investors are focused on how far SpaceX will break with existing market conventions. The "lock-up" rule, which typically prohibits insider stock sales for 180 days after listing, is also expected to be neutralized this time. SpaceX is reviewing a plan to allow existing shareholders to sell equity from the first day of listing.
Still, the "bubble" controversy persists. SpaceX's price-to-sales ratio (PSR) is about 67 times, which is more than double Nvidia's, the global face of the AI boom, at about 30 times.