How Elon Musk Engineered the World’s Biggest I.P.O.
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From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily.
On Monday, the AI giant Anthropic filed paperwork to go public, turbocharging a coming wave of blockbuster IPOs that could mint the world's first trillionaire and remake American capitalism. The first of those IPOs will be Elon Musk's SpaceX, set to begin selling shares as soon as next week. Today, business reporter Ryan Mack takes us inside the plan for SpaceX's record-shattering debut on the stock market and explains how it's already changing the rules for investing in ways that mean its success or failure will affect all of us.
It's Tuesday, June 2nd.
Ryan, welcome to the show.
Hey, Michael. Thanks for having me.
My pleasure. A confession here, it's very rare for The Daily to cover an IPO. And that's because it's pretty rare that an IPO generates a level of interest and excitement and worry that the one we're going to talk to you about today does. So my first question to you is, why does this initial public offering of SpaceX matter so much and feel so monumental to so many people?
I think it has everything to do with Elon Musk, SpaceX's founder and CEO. And like everything with Elon Musk, this IPO is singular. It's likely going to be the largest of all time, raising anywhere from 50 to 75 billion dollars. It's going to value this company likely at more than $1.25 trillion. Wow. And it could make Elon Musk, already the richest man in the world, already one of the most powerful people in the world, the world's first trillionaire. And this opportunity to invest in this kind of one-of-a-kind company I think that excites a lot of people. It is a rocket manufacturer. It launches things into space for the government and for private companies. And it's also got this artificial intelligence bent to it as well.
And what you're going to see in this IPO is a large involvement of retail or mom and pop investors who are excited to invest in a company they see as run by a generational entrepreneur.
Well, why is Musk trying to raise this money right now and through the method of an IPO? You don't have to make a company public to raise a lot of money. There are all kinds of ways to raise money.
You don't have to take it public, but this company has been private for more than 20 years. It was founded in 2002, and it's raised a lot of money already on the private markets from venture capitalists, from private equity funds. So as a company, you kind of get one shot to do this in your lifetime, to raise money on the public market for the first time.
What is the significance of SpaceX's upcoming IPO?
And so Elon Musk sees this as his opportunity to do that and to raise these tens of billions of dollars to fund a lot of the goals that SpaceX has for the next 10, 20, 30 years.
You must have solar-powered AI satellites in deep space. So this is where it's kind of handy to have a space company, I guess.
LAUGHTER I'm talking about visions to launch data centers into space for AI. You can mine the silicon on the moon, refine it, and create the solar panels, the solar cells and the radiators. I'm talking about landing humans on the moon and building factories to do mining.
We are going to be able to take astronauts to Mars and ultimately build a self-sustaining civilization on Mars. That is the long-term goal of the company.
Ultimately, he's talked about making humans multi-planetary, getting them to Mars and making us a species that exists on more than one planet.
It is very important, essential, that over the long term that we become a multi-planet species and ultimately even go beyond the solar system and bring life with us.
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