Commbank pushes SpaceX IPO as Elon Musk eyes trillionaire status: ‘Sign of the times’
June 3, 2026
It’s set to the biggest IPO in history. Elon Musk and his army of retail investors are shooting for the stars.
The reusable rocket and satellite company, responsible for low earth orbit internet service Starlink, is reportedly planning to sell a little more than 555 million shares at US$135 a pop, with the aim of raising US$75 billion in an IPO as early as next week.
If all goes according to plan, that gives SpaceX (which recently had Musk’s AI and data centre business xAI and the company formerly known as Twitter merged into it) an eye-watering valuation of US$1.75 trillion.
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It’s the first time shares in the company will be made available to regular investors, with the IPO including a potentially massive 30 per cent retail allocation, with underwriters of major trading platforms providing retail investors with allocations post-IPO.
Commonwealth Bank is reportedly the lead broker for the launch in Australia and emailed customers last week altering them to the opportunity to invest in the IPO.
CommSec declined to comment when approached by Yahoo Finance for details about its role and the availability of shares, but the industry is expecting strong retail demand – something that has long defined the lofty valuation of Musk’s other major company, Tesla.
“This is certainly very interesting because it’s a new company and it’s obviously a very significant company for the US economy and the global economy really,” Betashares’ Senior Investment Strategist Cameron Gleeson told Yahoo Finance.
“We’ve had this period where you’ve seen a lot of companies stay private for a long period of time … the concern here is that the growth has already sort of been seen for private investors,” he added.
But he pointed to previous high-profile IPOs like Meta, then Facebook, which he said had a similar sentiment around it at the time but has since seen massive share price growth in the past 14 years since going public.
“Yes, if you look at the stock on a price to sales ratio, for example, it looks terribly expensive,” he said of SpaceX, which is set to trade at a whopping 93 times revenue multiple.
“But you know the culture around these companies and the broader investing culture, and obviously the culture around Elon … I don’t think it’s wise to write them off.”
Gleeson noted that it’s certainly “interesting” to see such access slated for regular investors. “Elon likes to break the mould, whether it’s for PR purposes or whatever,” he said. “Perhaps he thinks there’ll be more buy and hold investing, rather than for example, institutions that might like to try and take a quick profit.”
Space trade blasts off on ASX
As NASA unveils plans for a base on the moon, and ongoing talk of putting data centres in space, the celestial-related sector has captivated investors lately.
Betashares, which provides access to a basket of stocks, launched the first ever Space Industry ETF on the ASX last month which happened to see a 30 per cent rise in the first few weeks, but has since fallen. The company said the ETF quickly grew to $9 million in assets in the first few weeks and expects SpaceX to be added to its underlying holdings two trading days after its IPO listing date.
SpaceX asserts that the addressable market it is primed to be a clear leader in is worth a ginormous $US29 trillion.
Musk, already the world’s richest person, holds more than 40 per cent of the shares in SpaceX (and will get a large majority of the voting rights) so even without that prediction being realised by commercial companies like his, a successful IPO would see him become the world’s first paper trillionaire.
After SpaceX filed to go public and provided its supporting documents to regulators in the US last month, pundits were quick to note the starry-eyed nature of it.
“The first 15 to 20 pages were pictures of rockets which was a little unusual,” fund manager Patrick Boyle told the Prof G podcast, which noted the term “the light of consciousness” was mentioned ten times in the filing.
“This is very much an IPO for the Elon Musk fan … it’s not really for people who are going to scrub through the numbers and ask questions about profitability,” he said.
Those documents also showed the company has lost US$37 billion since its inception.
MORE: Morningstar values SpaceX at less than half its IPO target
Market braces for trio of high profile mega IPOs
Emanuel Datt, Chief Investment Officer at Melbourne fund manager Datt Capital, said the trio of mega IPOs this year of SpaceX, Anthropic and OpenAI are very much aimed at retail investors.
“These IPOs are being marketed as once-in-a-generation opportunities, but the valuations defy conventional logic,” he said.
“When you see liquidity draining from other asset classes the moment these listings are announced, that tells you retail money is being repositioned. For example, money is moving from crypto towards these mega stock IPOs.
“It’s a sign of the times. You have a lot of speculation, you have hot new technology – a confluence of different factors clearly designed to suck in the retail dollar. The promoters of these companies are trying to capture the zeitgeist and basically sell the top,” he said.
As for SpaceX, whether it takes off into the stratosphere or ultimately blows up the brokerage accounts of true believers, all investors will be quickly exposed to the outcome after major index providers changed the rules to allow much faster entry of these mega IPOs into the broader market indices that are held by billions or people around the world.
As the Financial Review’s Chanticleer column noted on Thursday; “every passive investor and every super fund member is now incredibly exposed to a sector whose economic model is still largely built on hope”.
Buckle up.
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