Elon Musk could be about to make history by becoming the world’s first trillionaire.
His spaceflight company SpaceX is looking to raise up to $75 billion (£55 billion) when it goes public this month, setting the stage for the biggest ever stock market debut.
The company, formally known as Space Exploration Technologies Corp, said it will sell 555.6 million shares at $135 a piece in an initial public offering (IPO).
It would give SpaceX a market value of $1.77 trillion.
The spaceflight, telecommunications, and artificial intelligence company’s amended prospectus also updates details about how much control of the company Musk will have.
As SpaceX’s CEO, chief technical officer and chairman, Musk’s voting power will come primarily through his ownership of 5.22 billion Class B shares, which give the holder 10 votes for every share held.
According to the filing, Musk would have 82.4% of the voting power in the company.
Forbes currently values Musk’s net worth at $826 billion and his stake in SpaceX at $542 billion.
The estimated value of his SpaceX holdings was based on an overall value for the company of $1.25 trillion.
Based on those numbers, a $1.77 trillion valuation for SpaceX would boost Musk’s net worth by $223 billion, making him a trillionaire.
However, much of Musk’s worth is in stock that he has yet to cash in.
But even as it makes a bid for a blockbuster market debut, SpaceX is currently losing billions of dollars a year.
The filing shows that the company lost $2.6 billion from operations last year on $18.7 billion in revenue, and the losses kept piling up at the start of this year, too.
Time will tell how SpaceX fares on the market. Musk’s plans for the company are as fantastical as the money he hopes raise in the sale.
Colourful, even frightening in parts, the IPO document strikes a contrast with the typically dry, technical prose in IPO documents, detailing plans to use proceeds from the sale to help put men on the moon again and perhaps even Mars.
In one section, it talks of a need to build ‘a permanent human colony’ on the red planet with ‘at least one million inhabitants’ as existential threats loom that could consign man to ‘the same fate as the dinosaurs’.
Musk has almost equally ambitious plans for his other publicly traded company, Tesla.
His goal is to transform the maker of electric vehicles into a producer of robotaxis and humanoid robots.
Dan Ives of Wedbush Securities wrote in a research note that he expects Tesla and SpaceX to merge next year.
SpaceX plans to use the net proceeds from the IPO to fund the expansion of infrastructure for its AI and rocket businesses, and to beef up the constellation of satellites that power Starlink Mobile, among other investments.
The company plans to list on the Nasdaq under the symbol ‘SPCX’ and could begin trading as soon as the end of next week.
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