The Key Questions for a Potential SpaceX IPO in 2026: Analyst Roundtable

After more than two decades as a private company, SpaceX could go public in 2026. In mid-December, SpaceX Founder Elon Musk seemed to confirm reports of SpaceX considering going public, and reports estimate the IPO could value the company as high as $1.5 trillion.

It comes at a critical juncture for the company. SpaceX continues to rack up Starlink subscribers and Falcon 9 launch records, while making deeper inroads with the U.S. government with Starshield. At the same time, development is accelerating for the Starship rocket with critical NASA deadlines approaching, and newly disclosed plans for orbital data centers

Via Satellite surveyed some of the leading analysts in the space and satellite industry on some of the key questions surrounding a SpaceX IPO. Taking part in this roundtable are Tim Farrar, president of TMF Associates; Antoine Grenier, partner and global head of Satellite and Space consulting for Analysys Mason; Kimberly Siversen Burke, director of Government Affairs for Quilty Space; and Armand Musey, founder and president of Summit Ridge Group.

VIA SATELLITE: In the past, Elon Musk has talked about keeping SpaceX private because of the amount of money the company spends on R&D, and the scrutiny it would get from shareholders. At the same time, SpaceX has been successful raising money on the private markets. Why do you think SpaceX would choose to go public in 2026?

Grenier: I think the reasons for not going public were very valid for a long period of time, but I think a few things have changed. For Starlink, it's only quite recently been clear that the business model is sustainable and does work. Before, it would have been potentially quite difficult to start thinking about an IPO of this scale, which needs a much broader range of investors. The Starlink business model is established and it has also further growth — that's perfect timing for an IPO, in my opinion. The second point is that SpaceX does need more capital — and on a pretty large scale if it wants to do at the same time Starlink V3, the expansion of Starship, and even bolder plans for space exploration. An IPO is that one time when you can raise a lot more capital in one go, on a totally different scale.

Farrar: SpaceX has been very successful as a private company because it's been able to access capital for the last several years through secondary rounds. If SpaceX wanted to raise billions of dollars in the private markets, it probably could. In that context, I don't think that it's just about raising the money. I think a big part of it is — What is going to be the public center of Elon Musk's universe going forward? It has been centered around Tesla for the last decade. Even though Tesla is very valuable right now, there are a lot of headwinds for that company. It seems to me, this is a good time for Musk to pivot from Tesla being the center of that public universe to SpaceX being the center of that public universe. A $1.5 trillion IPO valuation — curiously enough, that's about the valuation that Tesla has right now.

VIA SATELLITE: SpaceX reportedly had a recent share sale valuing the company at $800 billion and reports show the IPO could value the company at $1.5 trillion. Other reports show the company’s revenue for 2025 in the range of $15 billion. How is this valuation justified?

Farrar: You can't easily justify the valuation of Tesla either in the context of normal metrics. People talk about a price 300-times earnings; SpaceX would have similar metrics that just don’t fit traditional metrics. I think the only way you justify it is through belief in Elon Musk. Space-based data centers are one of these very forward-looking, some would say, over-optimistic visions of the future. He's gone even further than that, talking about tens of thousands of Starships a year. Most people would say that's an outrageous projection of what's realistic in the foreseeable future. It is a test to some degree. You want people to invest in an IPO who are true believers in everything Elon Musk says. And if people are put off by those sort of statements, then they probably won't be investing in the IPO.

Musey: If you look at the forecasts for the launch business and the broadband business, it's really hard to get there. You have to believe that there are other things that are going to come out, other opportunities. I don’t know if it’s really going to be data centers in space. There’s a belief in additional technologies and businesses that have not yet been fully disclosed.

VIA SATELLITE: What happens after an IPO at that level, how does a company maintain that valuation?

Musey: Ultimately the stock price at some point will reflect the future stream of cash flows. Right now I think the estimated cash flows include things that don't exist, or that we don't know what they are. There are very few companies who can pull that off. If you invest in Apple or any technology company for example, you’re implicitly discounting cash flows many years out, and there are going to be new products. But here you're looking at completely new concepts like data centers in space. Elon Musk has been pretty good at creating these visions. Some seem a little extreme — like work will be optional and money will be irrelevant because of productivity from robots. But some are less so, like the autonomous car.

Farrar: How has Tesla managed to maintain its level of valuation in recent years when the demand for its cars has slowed? The parallels are there. You keep coming up with stories about future opportunities: what Starship is going to do, colonization of Mars, orbital data centers. Don't look too closely at the here and now.

Growth in the here and now is important, and Starlink is doing very well in terms of subscriber growth. We haven't seen a revenue number for 2025 so we don't know how much it grew. But it does look like they were short of Musk’s projection in June [of $15.5 billion]. The core Starlink business is not particularly supportive of a $1.5 trillion valuation, so you have to look to these future, more speculative opportunities and belief in Elon Musk as a justification.

Grenier: We've seen recent IPOs in space going very well initially, then the share price going down for lack of proof points, technical failures, or business momentum. Firefly Aerospace is an example like that. An IPO is usually planned well in advance to manage people's expectations and excitement on valuation, or else the stock price can come down quite quickly. Pre- and post- IPO events also need to stack up with the story and the metrics so what SpaceX decides to do before and after will have an impact. I think it is generally smart to leave some big layers of growth to come after an IPO to sustain the growth value of the stock. Let’s see if the data center in space idea flies. That could be huge, but there is still a lot to prove.

VIA SATELLITE: There was talk years ago about Starlink being spun-off as its own company in an IPO, but it seems the IPO would be for SpaceX overall. Do you think taking the whole company public makes more or less sense for SpaceX?

Burke: A Starlink-only IPO has always made sense on paper. Starlink is already the revenue engine — it’s approaching telecom scale, and it has clearer public-market comparables. As a standalone company, it would likely trade well, generate cash, and appeal to infrastructure and telecom investors who value predictability. But that predictability is also a limitation. On its own, Starlink would be valued like an exceptionally fast-growing ISP [internet service provider]. Even with strong margins and expanding verticals the business would still be boxed in by ARPU [average revenue per user], churn, spectrum constraints, contract lumpiness, and CapEx intensity.

Taking SpaceX public as a whole changes the equation. It allows Starlink’s cash flow to absorb Starship’s risk within a single public entity. Starship is capital-intensive, long-cycle, and still volatile. Funding a program like that is way easier when it sits next to a business that already generates cash. Split them apart, and Starship becomes a much heavier lift to finance. There is a tradeoff, though. A full SpaceX IPO brings scrutiny. Public shareholders will have opinions about Starship burn rates, Artemis timelines, and capital allocation in a way private investors don’t. The bottom line is that a Starlink IPO would optimize for cleanliness and predictability. A full SpaceX IPO optimizes for scale, narrative, and capital efficiency.

Musey: They're tied so closely together. Starlink would be a whole lot less successful if it didn't have access to cheap SpaceX launches, and SpaceX could not be doing what they're doing unless they had this continuous business from Starlink. Starlink is more than just the anchor customer for the Falcon 9 — it’s [a large] percent of the launches. The success of one is so intertwined with the other that things like intercompany pricing would be really complicated.

VIA SATELLITE: Do you see any risks for SpaceX in going public?

Farrar: Analysts generally have overestimated the revenue that Starlink has generated in the last few years, and it's been easy for SpaceX to control that narrative because it gives out limited amounts of information. Once you see real numbers there’s a lot more to analyze about the future growth of the market, the revenue trajectory. Particularly the ARPU trajectory — I think that's the biggest factor here. SpaceX has sold millions of terminals and added 4.6 million subscribers last year. But we don't know what ARPU they did that at. Visibility of some of those sorts of things will give much better insight into the true economics of this business. Whether that will lead to people readjusting their valuations and expectations is going to be very interesting to see.

Musey: The biggest risk — I don’t know if it’s a risk — is that they will have to publish financials. SpaceX has generally been a very secretive company. Every public company has to work through this, how to justify not disclosing things that are competitively sensitive while still providing shareholders with adequate information. That will require some work to figure out.

Sometimes when you try things they initially cost more than you expect and it makes shareholders nervous. There may be situations where it looks like they're burning money and shareholders get annoyed, but they're really two inches from a big breakthrough. It seems from the outside that Musk likes taking those kinds of risks. He’s done a lot of things that people thought were a fool’s errand, like a reusable launch vehicle. If you're a public company with a focus on super-ambitious things it’s sometimes hard to get investors to stay patient.

VIA SATELLITE: Musk is known as a visionary entrepreneur, but he’s become more polarizing over the past year with his political activity and opinions. Do you see Musk’s personal brand impacting a potential IPO?

Musey: I think the biggest impact of Musk's polarizing persona has been lower Tesla sales. The Tesla brand historically [caters to] people that have been somewhat to the left, and he's obviously to the right. I think Musk has learned a lesson from that and he seems to be backing off a little bit. Starlink is a consumer product mostly in rural areas, which typically in the U.S. are more Republican strongholds. And Starlink gets a significant amount of revenue from the government sector and the government contracts have stayed constant or have grown. I think the government generally wants more than one supplier, but Starlink is so far ahead that it's not clear what that other supplier is.

Burke: I think a lot of people will use Tesla as a precedent, and that’s a mistake. SpaceX isn’t a consumer brand you can boycott. It’s infrastructure. Tesla lives in a world of choice. Consumers can decide they don’t want to support Elon and buy a different car. Governments, militaries, telecom operators, airlines, and space agencies don’t get to opt out of the most capable launch provider or broadband satellite network on principle. That’s why Musk’s growing polarization hasn’t meaningfully dented Starlink adoption or SpaceX’s launch cadence. Even some of his loudest critics still fly payloads on Falcon 9, still rely on Starlink in conflict zones, and still integrate the system into national infrastructure. In markets with limited or no substitutes, values get swallowed pretty quickly. For investors, that actually blunts a lot of the brand risk. Musk’s rhetoric may be inflammatory and has increased calls for “alt-Starlinks,” but it hasn’t affected demand. Until credible competition exists at scale, outrage has very little say.

Where the risk does show up is in volatility and governance optics. Musk’s behavior can still invite regulatory friction, complicate political relationships, and inject noise into the stock once it’s public. But that’s different from existential business risk. It affects sentiment, not usage. I think the stock may trade on Elon sentiment at the margin, but the company’s fundamentals are insulated by its role as critical infrastructure.

Farrar: Without Elon Musk, there's no way that this company would be able to even consider going public at a $1.5 trillion valuation. I don't think we've seen the political side of his activities really bleeding into negative consequences for SpaceX. If you want to buy an electric car, there are now dozens of other options available to you at this point in time. There is no alternative to Starlink. I know lots of people who really dislike Elon Musk who hold their nose for Starlink. Will Amazon be able to change that dynamic for consumers who want alternatives? Possibly, although Amazon has an awful long way to go to catch up. We have seen the Canadian government backing Telesat and the French government backing Eutelsat OneWeb. You're going to see decisions made in other countries to choose an alternative or to back an alternative. But at the end of the day, do those [alternatives] deliver?

VIA SATELLITE: The Starship development program had a number of setbacks in 2025. How do you think Starship development this year could impact a SpaceX IPO?

Grenier: If suddenly Starship were to fail, then I imagine it would be a big blow to the timing of an IPO. That logic says that the next flights before the IPO will be extremely controlled. But this does not square well at all with current plans, which, in classic SpaceX, are for a high-risk in-orbit propellant transfer and for the next larger version of Starship. SpaceX continues to impress and progress with Starship was phenomenal in 2025, but it is going to be a big question. Do you want to build and launch a bigger Starship, and for whatever reason, it blows up just before the IPO? You clearly don't want that, or if it happens then the IPO may have to wait. What I expect as a result is a step test and most of the effort and steady progress on the existing Starship.

Burke: SpaceX needs to convince investors that Starship’s remaining risks are being worked down in a way that supports a scalable, predictable business. Public markets can live with partial reuse, slow refurbishment, and even early operational losses. Those are execution issues. What public markets won’t tolerate is uncertainty at the foundation. If reentry physics still feel unsettled, if thermal protection looks unsolved rather than incrementally improvable, or if vehicle dynamics keep forcing major redesigns, Starship remains a bet the market isn't ready to wager yet. In that environment, every test flight becomes a referendum instead of a data point, which is exactly what Elon Musk is trying to avoid by keeping SpaceX private.

VIA SATELLITE: Part of the reported rationale for SpaceX to go public is to fund building orbital data centers — a future space application we’re hearing more about over the past few months. What do you think about this angle to the pitch?

Burke: The idea that SpaceX would go public to fund orbital data centers doesn’t feel like a sudden strategy shift so much as meeting the market where it is. Growth is being valued through an AI lens, and positioning SpaceX within that stack changes how the company gets priced. The logic itself isn’t crazy. Terrestrial data centers are running into constraints on power, grid hookups, land, water, permitting, etc. Space offers a theoretical escape hatch. The issue is timing. As a near-term revenue driver, orbital data centers remain speculative. The economics aren’t proven, chips age quickly, servicing hardware in orbit isn’t trivial, and latency rules out many everyday AI workloads. Realistically, this only works at first for a narrow set of use cases – like batch training, defense, remote sensing, sovereign compute.

I think Elon's orbital compute ambitions are much more about framing the upside than driving near-term revenue. Linking SpaceX to AI infrastructure demand, with xAI as the implicit internal anchor customer, gives SpaceX valuation scaffolding and positions space-based compute as a plausible solution to the limits AI is starting to run into on Earth. It’s all very on-brand for Musk – not pitching something fully baked, but pulling the future close enough for the market to price it in.

Grenier: It's just one of the layers that are interesting and that could come to fruition. It could be one of the reasons to push the valuation from one level to another. But the big business reasons and drivers of growth for and value for SpaceX are not data centers today. It could be moving forward, but it's not proven yet. The economics for data center expansion on Earth are getting challenging and so maybe space is an area where people could make it work. There are big engineering challenges, but this company has solved many engineering challenges before.

VIA SATELLITE: SpaceX is already the dominant player atop the space industry and a post-IPO SpaceX would have even more cash at its disposal. How might this impact the competitive landscape in the space industry over the next few years?

Farrar: I think it's already brought more excitement and interest into the public space market. Since the IPO news broke at the beginning of December, we have seen people bidding up the value of other publicly traded space businesses like AST SpaceMobile and Rocket Lab and other companies that are in competition with SpaceX. But in the long term, SpaceX becoming more powerful — it’s not a rising tide lifts all boats. There is an element where some people will suffer from this. And it's not just the legacy players who suffer. There are new space companies that are also in competition with SpaceX. If SpaceX continues to be ever more dominant, that’s not good for a lot of those companies in the long term.

Musey: Governments around the world — U.S., Europe, Asia — don't want one person in control. The government always wants the second supplier. So they are going to continue likely to prop up other competitors. There will always be niches where competitors can be in small niches, but it does look like we're heading toward a monopoly. The biggest potential competitor would be Amazon. But the only way to seriously accelerate the launch of Amazon Leo is to use more SpaceX [launches]. The world doesn’t like an empire. Maybe strategically, SpaceX helps support Amazon as a competitor, so that the government doesn’t step in and break up the organization.

Grenier: There could be a ripple effect that could be beneficial for other space ventures. The SpaceX IPO will be an opportunity for early investors in SpaceX to cash in. They could double-down on the space sector they already know and redeploying that cash into other space ventures. That would be a very good thing, because at this stage some small but successful ventures need larger checks to scale.

For other listed companies that is a more difficult question. Some space stocks have already grown rapidly since the announcement but suddenly you end up with a company that has even more resources than the unlimited resources that it already had before. That could make it very hard for others as a result. For instance if they are still going head-to-head with SpaceX rather than with a differentiated play. How will investors in some impressive companies like Rocket Lab, Firefly Aerospace, Voyager and others think about it? People and stocks are already anticipating that there’s going to be a SpaceX IPO, but when it really happens, share prices could be quite volatile.

Burke: A post-IPO SpaceX with an extra $30 billion-ish of public-market ammo (if the targets hold) doesn’t just extend its lead – it arguably changes the shape of the industry. I see the competitive landscape splitting into two lanes: commodity-scale systems and mission-specific architectures. SpaceX already runs at a pace no one else can match today. Layer more capital on top of that, and SpaceX can iterate faster and front-load scale. Anyone trying to beat SpaceX at its own game — high cadence, low cost, vertically integrated — gets squeezed even harder.

At the same time, I see a real rising-tide effect. SpaceX going public would likely mainstream space as an investable category, not a hobby for sovereign wealth funds and long-horizon investors. The near-term effect is consolidation at the top. The medium-term effect is capital formation across the rest of the stack. SpaceX gets stronger, but space as an asset class gets easier to underwrite. VS