SpaceX's 'Craziest IPO Ever' Makes Wall Street Do The Math On A Million Martians

SpaceX's IPO filing is not just big. According to Aurelion Research, it is bizarre enough to belong in its own category.

Aurelion's section title, from a note published this week, says it plainly: "SpaceX (SPCX): The Craziest IPO Ever Filed." Then comes the line that explains why this is not just ordinary market hyperbole: "The S-1 IPO filing reads like a sci-fi novel."

In most IPOs, investors argue about revenue growth, margins, customer concentration, valuation multiples, and governance. In SpaceX's case, they still have to do all that — but they also have to think about orbital data centers, AI infrastructure, Elon Musk's voting control and, yes, a permanent Mars colony with at least one million inhabitants.

That is what the headline means. Wall Street is not literally being asked to forecast subscription revenue from future Martians. It is being asked to value a company whose own investor story, as described by Aurelion, stretches far beyond rockets and satellites into a world where Mars colonization is tied to CEO incentives and AI infrastructure is central to the valuation case.

The numbers are already extreme. Aurelion says SpaceX filed for what would be the biggest IPO in history, targeting a $1.75 trillion valuation. It says the company generated $18.7 billion in 2025 revenue, but still lost $4.9 billion, with $37 billion in cumulative losses since Musk founded it in 2002. Reuters also reported that SpaceX is targeting a record IPO valuation and is looking to raise around $75 billion.

But the strangest part is not the valuation. It is the performance math attached to Musk himself. Aurelion says Musk's compensation package, potentially worth $737 billion, is split into two milestones. The first, worth about $583 billion in stock, only vests if SpaceX reaches a $7.5 trillion market cap and builds a permanent Mars colony with at least one million inhabitants. Aurelion adds, with dry understatement, that "colonizing another planet is likely a first for a CEO performance metric."

That makes the Mars target financially relevant. It is not just Musk mythology, a keynote line or a fanboy dream. If it is part of the compensation architecture, investors have to ask what it says about SpaceX's priorities, capital allocation, governance and risk appetite.

A normal CEO bonus might depend on earnings, stock price or return on invested capital. SpaceX, as presented by Aurelion, is tying massive upside to a corporate future that includes one million people living on another planet.

Aurelion's deeper point is that SpaceX itself may no longer be mainly a rocket company. It writes: "Strip away the rockets and the Mars rhetoric. SpaceX is filing to go public as an AI infrastructure company that happens to own rockets."

The report says SpaceX spent $12.7 billion on AI infrastructure in 2025 and $7.7 billion in the first quarter of 2026, equal to 76 cents of every capital dollar. Aurelion also says the AI segment lost $6.4 billion in 2025 and another $2.4 billion in the first quarter of 2026, while Starlink's profits help fund the burn.

That is where the IPO becomes even harder to model. SpaceX has a real engine in Starlink. Aurelion says Starlink subscribers grew from 2.3 million in 2023 to 10.3 million by March 2026, and that the connectivity business generated $11.4 billion in 2025 revenue, or 61% of total company revenue. But it also says SpaceX's claimed total addressable market is $28.5 trillion, including $26.5 trillion in AI, which leads Aurelion to conclude that SpaceX is effectively telling investors rockets are the sideshow.

So "do the math on a million Martians" is shorthand for a broader investor problem: how do you value a company where the profitable satellite-internet business is only one part of the story, the AI business is burning huge sums, the long-term upside depends on space-based infrastructure, and the CEO's mega-award points all the way to Mars?

Aurelion does not pretend conventional valuation solves this neatly. It says standard DCF and sum-of-the-parts models "break down entirely" and calls the $1.75 trillion to $2 trillion valuation "entirely a momentum and sentiment play." Its blunt conclusion: without space data centers, SpaceX is worth at most $700 billion in its view; to approach the IPO valuation, investors have to assign roughly $1 trillion of value to that possibility.

That is why the "craziest IPO ever" framing works. SpaceX is not simply asking investors to buy growth. It is asking them to price a Musk-controlled company where Starlink cash flows, AI losses, orbital compute, thin-float momentum, and a million-person Mars colony all sit inside the same market story. In a normal IPO, Wall Street does the math on next year's earnings. In this one, Aurelion suggests, the math runs all the way to Mars.

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