Elon Musk's SpaceX is poised to become one of the most valuable publicly traded companies in the world.

The company, which manufactures rockets, space exploration technology and Starlink satellites, is currently privately held.

But on Wednesday it made a confidential filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for an initial public offering, which would allow shares to be traded in the stock market.

The value of SpaceX once it goes public is expected to surpass $1tn (£751bn).

That would make its eventual stock market debut one of the most financially significant in history.

Musk's own holding in SpaceX would put the billionaire on track to become the world's first trillionaire.

The company is aiming to officially go public sometime in June, according to reports in Bloomberg, Reuters and the New York Times.

A confidential IPO filing with the SEC allows a company to avoid immediately revealing information to the public while it requests feedback from the regulator.

The next step will be for company executives to hold "roadshows" - meetings with big investors to convince them to buy shares.

By making shares of SpaceX available for purchase by the public, the company is looking to raise $50bn or more, according to the reports. Earlier this year, SpaceX took over xAI, Musk's artificial intelligence venture.

After that all-stock merger, SpaceX is believed to have become the most valuable private company in the world, with an internal valuation of $1.

Last year, xAI, best known for its chatbot Grok, took over X, the social media platform previously called Twitter that Musk bought in 2022.

This degree of consolidation was a clear sign to investors that SpaceX was preparing to go public.

Emily Zheng, a senior analyst at Pitchbook, earlier told the BBC that by bringing xAI under SpaceX, Musk could show potential investors that he was consolidating costs and able to easily share resources between his companies.

With its large-scale ambitions, SpaceX is in need of a massive cash infusion that going public can provide, Zheng added.

The company is racing to keep up with the "sheer cost of compute, infrastructure, and energy" needed to expand, she said.

The billionaire said a significant share of Tesla's manufacturing would begin to shift toward building robots, which would make use of xAI technology like Grok.

SpaceX would also partner with Tesla and xAI in the massive chipmaking endeavour Musk announced last month, which he is calling Terafab.

"Tesla, xAI and SpaceX have all done amazing things that people did not think could be done before," Musk said in a March presentation discussing Terafab

Highlighted sentences link to their corresponding claims. Click any highlighted sentence to jump to its detailed analysis.
Highlight Colors Indicate Claim Quality:
✓ Healthy Claim - No fallacies or contradictions detected
⚠️ Minor Issues - Has contradictions or minor fallacies
🚨 Serious Issues - Multiple contradictions or severe fallacies
Quality Criteria: Claims are evaluated for logical fallacies and contradictions with other news sources. Green highlights indicate healthy claims suitable for reference.
Source