Shooting for the Stars

Jun 3

Spaceman reaching for moon with a bag of money

Space Exploration Technologies (ticker: SPCX) filed its S-1 Registration Statement with the SEC on May 20, 2026, targeting an IPO on the Nasdaq by June 12, 2026. The company is seeking a capital raise that implies an equity valuation of at least $1.8 trillion — recently trimmed from an initial $2 trillion target — on a gross capital raise of approximately $75 billion. If achieved, this would be the largest IPO in history, surpassing Saudi Aramco's $29.4 billion offering in 2019.

For Christian investors, this is an opportunity to exercise discernment and take an active interest in what your investments support before this gets passively added to index funds.

High-Level Look

At a $1.75 trillion equity valuation:

EV / Adjusted EBITDA: ~265x
Trailing Price / Sales: ~97x

These are extraordinary multiples for a company whose namesake segment operated at a net loss of ~$662M on ~$4.1B of revenue.¹ The cash cow segment, Starlink, is impressive and worthy of recognition for its satellite connectivity technology — but the growth multiple implicit in the valuation for this segment is severely overstated. Starlink is the only profitable segment within the company, and while past growth is impressive, average revenue per user (ARPU) has declined ~33% from $99/month in 2023 to ~$66/month in Q1 2026. The cash engine is weakening at the margin, the flagship launch segment is currently unprofitable, and the wildcard segment, xAI, is unproven and weak relative to the industry.

Leveraging the satellite technology base of Starlink to move datacenter storage and AI compute to space for energy and land efficiency is an interesting argument that many make for the long-term trajectory of the company. We are not analyzing the investment case for SPCX here — but since it is likely to receive fast-track inclusion into major indices, which will then flow through into passive index funds, it is worth calling out these considerations.

The scale of this IPO has allowed SpaceX to leverage its size and political influence to accelerate index inclusion rules, effectively guaranteeing tens of billions in passive inflows. Typical inclusion timelines for new issuances range from approximately 6–12 months, but Nasdaq's new rule change could allow inclusion potentially as soon as 15 days after IPO.³

Governance and Shareholder Risk

The argument for owning this company is weaker from a faith-based perspective than from a pure investment one. Looking through SpaceX's IPO documents, the governance issues are extremely concerning — a 4% public float while Elon Musk (CEO, Chief Technical Officer, and Chairman of the Board) retains ~85% of voting power.⁴ Further, most executives have a financial connection to Musk and incentive alignment to follow his direction for the company regardless of shareholder interest.

The shareholder setup is reminiscent of Zuckerberg's Metaverse transformation, which shareholders were powerless to fight. When Meta pivoted to the Metaverse in 2021, shareholders who disagreed had no meaningful recourse — Zuckerberg's supervoting structure absorbed all opposition. SpaceX's structure is even more concentrated.

A capital raise at this extreme valuation also implies that retail investors — who are being actively targeted for launch-day and IPO subscriptions — will be absorbing exit liquidity for insiders and early private holders cashing out at astronomical valuations (pun intended). Compounding this risk, SpaceX insiders are reportedly permitted to sell shares earlier than the standard 180-day lockup window typical of major IPOs.⁵

Deceptive and Leading Language

SpaceX, despite its misleading name, derives most of its operating profits from the satellite internet segment, Starlink, and most of its TAM expectations are predicated on the AI market through xAI.

The prospectus opens with this mission statement:

"Our mission is to build the systems and technologies necessary to make life multiplanetary, to understand the true nature of the universe, and to extend the light of consciousness to the stars. To do this, we have formed the most ambitious, vertically integrated innovation engine on (and off) Earth with unmatched capabilities to rapidly manufacture and launch space-based communications that connect the world, to harness the Sun to power a truth-seeking artificial intelligence that advances scientific discovery, and ultimately to build a base on the Moon and cities on other planets." — SpaceX S-1 Registration Statement

The prospectus opens with ambitious, emotionally evocative language about conquering space, colonizing other planets, and "extending the light of consciousness to the stars." This framing would lead an uninformed reader to believe their investment is going toward the advancement of the human race across the solar system to a galaxy far, far way. In reality, the company is primarily prioritizing enterprise development of its AI technology — technology built on the borderline privacy infringement of social media users. We leave open the possibility that this vision is sincere, but it is difficult to argue that the charged language of the prospectus is anything other than misleading when held against the actual financial composition of the business.

Within the S-1 and supporting documents, management identifies a TAM of nearly the size of U.S. GDP (~$29 trillion), with the bulk coming from AI opportunities in xAI:

"We believe we have identified the largest actionable total addressable market ("TAM") in human history. We estimate that our quantifiable TAM is $28.5 trillion, consisting of $370 billion in Space from space-enabled solutions; $1.6 trillion in Connectivity across $870 billion in Starlink Broadband and $740 billion in Starlink Mobile as well as additional opportunities in enterprise and government; $26.5 trillion in AI across $2.4 trillion in AI infrastructure, $760 billion in consumer subscriptions, $600 billion in digital advertising, and $22.7 trillion in enterprise applications." — SpaceX S-1 Registration Statement

To put that in context: the $26.5 trillion AI opportunity claim represents more than the entire 2025 GDP of the European Union — an extraordinary claim for a company that generated ~$3.2B in AI revenue last year at a ~$2.5B operating loss.⁶ Some sources estimate that ~$250B of the current $1.75T valuation is attributed to xAI — a company widely considered subpar in its safety guardrails, data governance, and AI quality relative to peers.⁷

Grok AI has been trained — largely through deceptive automatic privacy opt-ins without user awareness — on X user data that began flowing to xAI following the March 2025 merger of the two companies.⁸ SpaceX's argument for the "truth-seeking" superiority of Grok and xAI is built upon its training corpus of data from millions of daily active X users. AI safety researchers consistently cite xAI's guardrails and documentation as opaque and reckless relative to the rest of the industry. Grok has had several high-profile incidents including antisemitic responses, genocidal suggestions, and the generation of non-consensual, sexualized, and distorted images of real individuals.⁹ There are serious ethical implications in supporting a company that actively practices this type of negligence — even if it were profitable.

A Pattern of Conduct

Musk's character and leadership record have been extensively documented. The following are among the most substantiated examples of the gap between his public self-presentation and his actual conduct — each backed by legal proceedings or regulatory action:

"Funding secured" — securities fraud (2018). Musk tweeted that Tesla would be taken private at $420/share and that "funding was secured" — a statement the SEC proved was false, as no financing had been arranged. Tesla stock spiked 6% before the truth emerged. Musk paid a $20M fine, surrendered his chairmanship, and agreed to have material tweets pre-approved by Tesla lawyers — an agreement he later violated.¹⁰
Twitter stake late disclosure — cost shareholders $143M+ (2022). Musk crossed the SEC's mandatory 5% disclosure threshold for Twitter in early March 2022 but waited 11 extra days to report it, during which he spent $500M+ buying additional shares at artificially depressed prices. The SEC filed its own civil fraud lawsuit in January 2025, and federal courts ruled Musk must face the shareholder fraud lawsuit.¹¹
Nine consecutive years of broken Full Self-Driving promises (2015–2025). Musk promised autonomous Teslas were "three years away" in 2015, then promised a coast-to-coast autonomous drive by 2017, then "first half of 2018" — and then the same promise in 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, and 2023. An internal California DMV memo obtained via FOIA explicitly stated that "Elon's tweet does not match engineering reality." Musk himself eventually called himself "the boy who cried FSD."¹²
Conflict of interest at over 70% of DOGE targets (2025). A Public Citizen report found that while serving as head of DOGE, Musk held direct business interests in over 70% of the agencies DOGE targeted for cuts — including NHTSA (which regulates Tesla's autonomous vehicles) and the CFPB (which would regulate X's payment services). Columbia Law School's government ethics expert described him as "basically a walking conflict of interest."¹³
Jury found Musk liable for misleading Twitter shareholders (March 2026). A San Francisco jury found Musk liable for two materially false and misleading statements during the Twitter acquisition — specifically tweets claiming the deal was "on hold" due to bot counts, which caused shareholders to panic-sell at depressed prices. Though the jury stopped short of finding a full fraud "scheme," the liability finding on material misstatements is a direct, recent court ruling on Musk's honesty in public communications.¹⁴

And one of my personal favorites — illustrative precisely because the stakes were so trivial:

Musk claimed to be a world-class gamer, then admitted to paying strangers to play for him. After boasting publicly about his elite-level skills in Diablo IV and Path of Exile 2 — and even streaming "himself" playing — the gaming community exposed that he had hired others to level up his account and purchased black-market in-game items (a practice called "real money trading"). He eventually admitted to both. His justification was essentially "everyone does it" — a defense that drew widespread mockery as a telling window into how he navigates the gap between his public self-image and reality.¹⁵

Putting It Together

The SPCX IPO provides a meaningful opportunity for faith-driven investors and faith-based investment managers to take an active, Christ-forward position. Whether that means engaging with your financial advisor about exclusion from your portfolio, advocating for BRI-screened index alternatives, or simply being informed before passive vehicles make the decision for you — this is a moment where intentionality matters.