Elon Musk’s SpaceX has revealed its plans to go public in the US, allowing people to trade shares in the firm on the stock market. The initial public offering (IPO) on the US stock market is set to be the largest in Wall Street history and could start next month under the ticker symbol SPCX.

A Valuation of $1.75tn

SpaceX revealed its plans to list publicly on the US stock market Wednesday, disclosing its investor prospectus and revealing details about its financials for the first time. Elon Musk’s rocket and satellite operations company will go public on the Nasdaq exchange at a valuation of about $1.75tn under the symbol SPCX, likely on 12 June. It is seeking up to $80bn in investment.

Because of the shares he will own in SpaceX, the IPO could make billionaire Musk, who is already the world’s richest person, a trillionaire — SpaceX values itself at $1.25tn, and Musk’s majority ownership of the company means his share could be worth more than $600bn.

Financials and Legal Risks

The filing offers a long-anticipated look at the financial state of SpaceX; Last year, Space Exploration Technologies – as it’s officially known – brought in $18.6bn (£13.8bn) in revenue but had a net loss of $4.9bn. In the first three months of this year, it achieved $4.7bn in sales but made a net loss of $4.3bn.

Meanwhile, its balance sheet shows it has $102bn in assets, such as rockets and other equipment, but also carries $60.5bn of debt — SpaceX also flagged more than half a billion dollars in expected legal costs stemming from a long list of claims.

Some of these come from “multiple lawsuits” alleging that Grok, the chatbot made by xAI, is being used to create sexualized deepfakes of real women and girls. Musk has said he intends to dissolve xAI and pursue his AI ambitions under SpaceX, as SpaceX also owns X, the social media app previously known as Twitter which Musk purchased in 2022.

Competitors and Legal Challenges

Other ongoing cases against SpaceX listed in the IPO include patent infringement claims, claims of noncompliance with EU content moderation, music copyright infringement claims, and data breach claims. Also revealed in the filing on Wednesday were the financial terms of the deal that SpaceX recently struck with an AI competitor, Anthropic, the developer of Claude. Anthropic will pay $15bn a year to access data centres in the American South for Musk’s xAI, which was recently acquired by SpaceX.

Musk’s AI ambitions have struggled amid a spate of controversies, but SpaceX’s rocket business and Starlink are considered leaders in the industry – both possess a comfortable lead over the competition. The IPO filing comes just days after Musk lost a high-profile legal battle against rival AI company OpenAI and its boss, Sam Altman; Musk had accused Altman of breaching a non-profit contract by shifting the ChatGPT-maker to a for-profit after Musk had donated millions of dollars.

The jury voted unanimously to throw out the case, finding that the timeframe to bring his claims expired because Musk had waited too long to file his 2024 lawsuit. At trial. Musk told jurors that his AI start-up xAI was small relative to OpenAI, which is also expected to sell shares to the public imminently.