Author:XiaobingDeep Tide TechFlow
In the winter of 2025, the sea breeze in Boca Chica, Texas, was still salty and fierce, but the air in Wall Street was exceptionally hot.
On December 13th, a piece of news shot to the financial headlines like a Falcon Heavy rocket:SpaceX's latest round of internal stock offerings has locked the company's valuation at $800 billion.
A memo reveals that SpaceX is actively preparing for its 2026 IPO, planning to raise over $30 billion. Musk hopes the company's overall valuation will reach $1.5 trillion. If successful, this would bring SpaceX's market capitalization close to Saudi Aramco's record-breaking 2019 IPO. For Musk, this is an incredibly magical moment. As the world's richest man, his personal wealth will break historical records again with the launch of SpaceX's "super rocket," making him the first trillionaire in human history. Rewind the clock 23 years, and no one would have believed this outcome. At that time, SpaceX was nothing more than a "manufacturing loser" that could be crushed at any moment in the eyes of giants like Boeing and Lockheed Martin. More accurately, it was more like a disaster that dragged on endlessly. When a man decides to build rockets... In 2001, Elon Musk was 30 years old. He had just cashed out from PayPal, holding hundreds of millions of dollars in cash, standing at the typical "point of freedom" in Silicon Valley. He could have sold his company like Marc Andreessen, the founder of a16z, and become an investor, an evangelist, or even done nothing at all. But Musk chose the most unbelievable path. He wanted to build rockets and go to Mars. To achieve this dream, he and two friends went to Russia to try and buy refurbished Dnepr launch vehicles as a launch vehicle to realize the Mars Oasis project. The outcome was humiliating. During a meeting with the Lavochkin Design Bureau, a Russian chief designer spat at Musk, believing that this American nouveau riche knew nothing about space technology. Ultimately, the other party offered an exorbitant price and implied "get out if you don't have the money," leaving the team empty-handed. On the return flight, his fellow travelers were dejected, but Musk was typing away on his computer. A moment later, he turned and showed a spreadsheet: "Hey, I think we can build it ourselves." That year, China had just launched Shenzhou II, and space exploration was seen as a national miracle, a game only major powers could participate in. A private company wanting to build rockets was as ridiculous as a primary school student claiming to build a nuclear reactor in their backyard. This was SpaceX's journey "from zero to one." Growth is a process of continuous failure. In February 2002, SpaceX was officially founded in a 75,000-square-foot old warehouse at 1310 Grand Avenue East, El Segundo, a suburb of Los Angeles. Musk used $100 million from the proceeds of cashing out PayPal as seed money, setting the company's vision as "Southwest Airlines of the space industry," providing low-cost, highly reliable space transportation services. But reality quickly dealt this idealist a heavy blow; building rockets was not only difficult but also exorbitantly expensive. There's an old saying in the aerospace industry: "You can't wake Boeing up without a billion dollars." Musk's $100 million in seed funding seems like a drop in the ocean in this industry. Even more challenging is that SpaceX faces a market tightly controlled by century-old giants like Boeing and Lockheed Martin. These giants not only possess formidable technological strength but also deep-rooted government connections. Accustomed to monopolies and lucrative government contracts, they have only one attitude towards SpaceX, this newcomer: they'll laugh at it. In 2006, SpaceX's first rocket, the Falcon 1, stood on the launch pad. This was both a tribute to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Falcon project and an implicit homage to the Millennium Falcon from Star Wars. It was small, even somewhat shabby, like an unfinished product. Unsurprisingly, the rocket exploded 25 seconds after liftoff. In 2007, a second launch took place. After a brief flight of a few minutes, it again went out of control and crashed. A wave of ridicule followed. Some commented scathingly, "Does he think rockets are like code? You can patch them?" In August 2008, the third launch failure was the most devastating; the first and second stages collided, and the hope that had just ignited instantly turned into debris over the Pacific Ocean. The atmosphere completely changed. Engineers began to suffer from insomnia, suppliers started demanding cash, and the media became unfriendly. Most critically, the money was running out. 2008 was the darkest year of Musk's life. The financial crisis swept the globe, Tesla was on the verge of bankruptcy, and his wife of ten years left him… SpaceX's funds were only enough for one last launch. If the fourth attempt fails, SpaceX will dissolve, and Musk will lose everything. Just then, the sharpest blow came. Musk's childhood idols, Neil Armstrong, the first man on the moon, and Cernan, the last man on the moon, publicly stated their complete lack of faith in his rocket program. Armstrong bluntly said, "You don't know what you don't understand." Later, recalling those days, Musk's eyes reddened on camera. He didn't cry when the rocket exploded, he didn't cry when the company nearly went bankrupt, but he cried when he mentioned his idols' mockery. Musk told the host, “These are my heroes, it’s really tough. I wish they could come and see how tough my job is.” At this moment, a subtitle appeared: “Sometimes the very people you look up to, let you down.” Before the fourth launch, no one talked about the Mars program anymore. A somber silence enveloped the entire company. Everyone knew that this Falcon 1 rocket was scraped together with their last penny; if it failed, the company was doomed to dissolve. On launch day, there were no grand declarations, no passionate speeches. Only a group of people stood in the control room, silently staring at the screens. On September 28, 2008, the rocket lifted off, a fiery dragon illuminating the night. This time, the rocket didn't explode, but the control room remained deathly silent until nine minutes later, when the engines shut down as planned, and its payload entered its designated orbit. "It's a success!" Thunderous applause and cheers erupted in the control center. Musk raised his arms high, and his brother Kimball, standing beside him, began to cry. The Falcon 1 made history; SpaceX became the world's first private commercial space company to successfully launch a rocket into orbit. This success not only saved SpaceX but also provided the company with a long-term lifeline. On December 22nd, Musk's phone rang, marking the end of his disastrous year of 2008. NASA's chief of spaceflight, William Gerstämmerer, brought him good news: SpaceX had secured a $1.6 billion contract for 12 round trips between the space station and Earth. "I love NASA," Musk blurted out, then changed his computer login password to "ilovenasa." Having narrowly escaped death, SpaceX survived. Jim Cantrell, who was among the first to participate in SpaceX's rocket development and was a close friend of Musk who once lent him his college rocket textbooks, recalled the successful launch of the Falcon 1 with deep emotion: "Elon Musk's success isn't because he's visionary, nor because he's exceptionally intelligent, nor because he works tirelessly—although those are all true—but the most important element of his success is that the word 'failure' doesn't exist in his dictionary. Failure is never in his thoughts." If the story ended here, it would simply be an inspirational tale. But the truly terrifying part of SpaceX begins from here. Musk insists on a seemingly irrational goal: rockets must be reusable. Almost all internal experts oppose this. It's not technically impossible, but commercially too aggressive, just as "nobody recycles disposable paper cups." But Musk persists. He believes that if planes are discarded after a single flight, nobody can afford to fly; and if rockets cannot be reused, spaceflight will forever remain a game for a select few. This is Musk's underlying logic: first principles. Returning to the beginning of the story, why did Musk, a programmer by training, dare to personally build rockets? In 2001, after consulting countless professional books, Musk meticulously broke down the various cost data for rocket construction in an Excel spreadsheet. The analysis showed that the manufacturing cost of rockets had been artificially inflated by traditional aerospace giants by tens of times. These well-funded giants, accustomed to the comfort zone of "cost-plus" pricing—where even a single screw costs hundreds of dollars—would ask, "How much do the raw materials for this—aluminum and titanium—cost on the London Metal Exchange? Why does it cost a thousand times more to make a part?" If costs are artificially inflated, they can certainly be artificially suppressed. Thus, guided by first principles, SpaceX embarked on a path with virtually no way out: repeated launches, analysis after explosions, more explosions, and repeated attempts at recovery. All the doubts abruptly ceased that winter night. December 21, 2015, is a day destined to be etched in the annals of human spaceflight history. A Falcon 9 rocket carrying 11 satellites launched from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. Ten minutes later, a miracle occurred: the first-stage booster successfully returned to the launch site, landing vertically in Florida like something out of a science fiction movie. At that moment, the old rules of the space industry were shattered. The era of affordable spaceflight was ushered in by this once-humble company. Building a Starship with Stainless Steel If reusable rockets represent SpaceX's challenge to physics, then building a Starship with stainless steel is Musk's "lower-dimensional attack" on engineering. In the early stages of developing the Starship aimed at colonizing Mars, SpaceX also fell into the trap of focusing on "high-tech materials." The industry consensus at the time was that to fly to Mars, rockets must be lightweight enough, thus requiring the use of expensive and complex carbon fiber composite materials. To this end, SpaceX invested heavily in creating massive carbon fiber winding molds. However, the slow progress and high costs alarmed Musk. He returned to first principles and did the math: Carbon fiber costs as much as $135 per kilogram and is extremely difficult to process; while 304 stainless steel, the material used to make kitchen pots and pans, costs only $3 per kilogram. "But stainless steel is too heavy!" Faced with the engineers' questions, Musk pointed out a neglected physical truth: melting point. Carbon fiber has poor heat resistance and must be covered with thick and expensive heat-insulating tiles; stainless steel has a melting point as high as 1400 degrees Celsius, and its strength actually increases at the ultra-low temperature of liquid oxygen. Including the weight of the thermal insulation system, the total weight of the rocket built with "bulky" stainless steel is comparable to that of carbon fiber, yet the cost is reduced by 40 times! This decision allowed SpaceX to completely break free from the shackles of precision manufacturing and aerospace materials. They don't need cleanrooms; they can set up a tent on the Texas wasteland and weld rockets like building water towers. If one explodes, they don't care; they just sweep up the debris and continue welding the next day. This first-principles thinking has permeated SpaceX's entire development process. From questioning "Why can't rockets be reused?" to "Why must space materials be expensive?", Musk always starts from the most basic laws of physics, challenging the industry's existing assumptions. "Using inexpensive materials to build top-tier engineering projects" is SpaceX's core competitive advantage. Starlink is the real game-changer. Technological breakthroughs have led to a surge in valuation. From $1.3 billion in 2012, to $400 billion in July 2024, and now to $800 billion, SpaceX's valuation has truly "taken off like a rocket." But what truly supports this astronomical valuation is not rockets, but Starlink. Before Starlink, for ordinary people, SpaceX was just a series of spectacular news reports of occasional explosions and landings. Starlink changed everything. This low-Earth orbit constellation of thousands of satellites is becoming the world's largest internet service provider, transforming "spaceflight" from a spectacle into an infrastructure as essential as water and electricity. Whether on a cruise ship in the middle of the Pacific Ocean or amidst the ruins of war, a receiver the size of a pizza box can transmit signals from low Earth orbit hundreds of kilometers away. It has not only changed the global communications landscape but has also become a super money-printing machine, providing SpaceX with a continuous stream of cash flow. As of November 2025, Starlink had 7.65 million active subscribers globally, with actual user reach exceeding 24.5 million. North America contributed 43% of subscriptions, while emerging markets such as South Korea and Southeast Asia contributed 40% of new users. This is why Wall Street dared to give SpaceX such a high valuation—not because of the frequency of rocket launches, but because of the recurring revenue generated by Starlink. Financial data shows that SpaceX's projected revenue for 2025 is $15 billion, and is expected to surge to $22-24 billion in 2026, with over 80% of that revenue coming from its Starlink business. This means that SpaceX has completed a remarkable transformation; it is no longer just a contract-dependent space contractor, but has evolved into a global telecommunications giant with a monopolistic moat. On the eve of its IPO, if SpaceX successfully raises $30 billion through its IPO, it will surpass Saudi Aramco's record of $29 billion raised in 2019, becoming the largest IPO in history. According to some investment banks, SpaceX's final IPO valuation could even reach $1.5 trillion, potentially challenging Saudi Aramco's $1.7 trillion listing record set in 2019 and directly entering the ranks of the world's top 20 listed companies by market capitalization. Behind this astronomical figure, the employees at the Boca Chica and Hawthorne factories are the first to react with excitement. In the recent internal share sale, the price of $420 per share means that a large number of engineers who slept on the factory floor with Musk and endured countless "production hells" will become millionaires or even billionaires. But for Musk, an IPO is not a traditional "cash out and leave," but rather an expensive "refueling." Previously, Musk had consistently opposed going public. At a SpaceX conference in 2022, Musk poured cold water on the idea of an IPO for all employees, telling them not to have any illusions about it: "Going public is absolutely an invitation to pain, and the stock price will only distract you." Three years later, what made Musk change his mind? No matter how ambitious one's aspirations, they all need capital support. According to Musk's timeline, within two years, the first Starship will conduct an unmanned Mars landing test; within four years, human footprints will be imprinted on the red Martian soil. His ultimate vision—to establish a self-sufficient city on Mars within 20 years through the transit of 1,000 Starships—requires an astronomical sum of money. In numerous interviews, he has stated that the sole purpose of accumulating wealth is to make humanity a "multiplanetary species." From this perspective, the hundreds of billions of dollars raised in the IPO can be seen as Musk charging Earthlings "interstellar transit fees." We eagerly anticipate that the largest IPO in human history will not ultimately become yachts or mansions; instead, it will be transformed into fuel, steel, and oxygen, paving the long road to Mars.
Weatherly
Anais