SpaceX is poised to raise more money in its IPO than was raised in last year’s 90 IPOs, combined

It will be the mother of all IPOs.

Last year notched a comeback for initial public offerings, and the resurgence greatly boosted capital markets profits at the big name financial institutions, and helped generate a banner year for investment banker bonuses. But now a single IPO is poised to raise more money alone than all 90 of last year’s IPOs, combined—and that means Wall Street will make more money, too.

This super-whale is none other than Elon Musk’s SpaceX, which just mushroomed in size via its all-stock acquisition of another bastion of the tech titan’s empire, xAI, creator of the chatbot Grok. News that Musk planned an IPO for SpaceX emerged in December, around the time a new funding round valued the rocket enterprise at $800 billion. In January, just prior to being bought by SpaceX, xAI achieved a $230 billion cap via a fresh capital raise.

Hence, investors are already giving the combined companies an equity valuation of over $1 trillion. And Musk wants more. According to reports in Bloomberg and the Financial Times, he aims at an offering that would give the new SpaceX a market cap of $1.5 trillion, raising around $50 billion in cash to fund expansion. Analyst Franco Granda of PitchBook believes that a $1.75 trillion mark is justifiable based on SpaceX’s gigantic growth opportunities, especially for its Starlink satellite franchise.

The actual prospects for SpaceX’s future financial performance and stock price are highly uncertain, since as of today, by Fortune‘s analysis, after 23 years it still generates zero net earnings. To justify a $1.5 trillion market cap, it would need to earn more than Berkshire Hathaway does today to generate decent returns for shareholders.

But one cohort is en route to pocketing a never-before-seen windfall while taking virtually no risk: the Wall Street banks that shepherd the deal.

The fees on a SpaceX IPO would be huge, but the big money comes from underpricing

At $1.5 trillion, the SpaceX debut would rank as the second-most-valuable IPO in history—trailing only the Saudi Aramco introduction........

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