ARK dissects SpaceX's sky-high IPO: $1.75 trillion valuation, 95 times price-to-sales ratio, where did the money go?

Author: ARK Invest

Compiled by: Deep潮 TechFlow

Overview: SpaceX submitted a confidential listing application to the SEC on April 1, targeting a valuation of $1.75 trillion, raising up to $75 billion, and is expected to list on Nasdaq as early as June 2026. This will be the largest IPO in the history of capital markets.

As one of the largest venture-capital investment holders in SpaceX, ARK Invest has released this comprehensive investment guide, answering investors’ most important questions one by one—from valuation logic and business breakdowns to fund holding strategies.

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On April 1, 2026, SpaceX submitted a confidential registration statement draft to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), taking the first step toward going public. This will be the largest initial public offering (IPO) in the history of capital markets. The company’s target valuation is $1.75 trillion, with a potential fundraising of up to $75 billion, and it could list on Nasdaq as early as June 2026.

For investors in ARK Venture Fund, this news is not surprising. SpaceX has long been the fund’s largest holding, accounting for 17.02% of the fund’s net assets as of March 31, 2026. ARK began building and refining its investment thesis long ago when SpaceX was an early-stage venture-capital target, and now the questions flooding into investors’ inboxes are already well-prepared for by ARK.

This guide answers the most important questions among them.

What exactly did SpaceX submit? What happens next?

SpaceX’s confidential submission allows the company to provide its financial data to the SEC for review before disclosing it to the public. Under SEC rules, the public version of the S-1 prospectus must be released at least 15 days before the company begins promoting its stock to investors. This prospectus will be the first window for outsiders to see SpaceX’s complete financial picture, including revenue figures, profit-margin structure, the accounting treatment of the February 2026 xAI merger, defense contract disclosures, and the governance framework that will determine how much control Elon Musk will retain after listing.

This IPO’s internal codename is “Project Apex,” handled by an ultra-large underwriting syndicate comprising at least 21 banks. Listing on Nasdaq in June 2026 will make SpaceX the first shot in Bloomberg’s “Super IPO Triple Play”—ahead of OpenAI and Anthropic—and will break Saudi Aramco’s 2019 IPO record of $29 billion by nearly three times.

Is a $1.75 trillion valuation credible?

ARK’s research is designed to answer this question. The most rigorous answer is: this valuation reflects a set of specific assumptions about the future, not the reality of today.

Based on a $1.75 trillion valuation versus estimated 2025 revenue of about $18.5 billion, SpaceX’s price-to-sales (P/S) ratio at the IPO price is about 95x. In the public market, no company of comparable scale has ever traded at this multiple. This valuation reflects investors’ belief in SpaceX’s future form, and understanding it requires looking at each business segment piece by piece.

Starlink is the financial engine. SpaceX’s satellite internet service had surpassed 10 million global active users by early 2026, and 2026 revenue is expected to exceed $20 billion. ARK’s research has long determined that Starlink is the telecom network with the fastest user and revenue growth worldwide, and the facts have even shown that this judgment may be conservative. According to ARK’s research, the scaled annual revenue opportunity in the satellite connectivity market alone could be close to $160 billion, and structurally Starlink holds a disproportionate share.

Launch services are still the foundation. In 2025, SpaceX completed 165 orbital launches, deploying about 85% of the world’s spacecraft. ARK’s research shows that since 2008, the company has reduced launch costs by roughly 95%—from about $15,600 per kilogram down to less than $1,000 per kilogram for Falcon 9. According to ARK’s research, the fully reusable Starship targets a cost below $100 per kilogram, which would deliver another order-of-magnitude cost reduction and open up market space that does not yet exist today.

The xAI merger and orbital computing represent the most forward-looking dimensions of valuation. The February 2026 merger will vertically integrate launch, communications, and AI model infrastructure under one entity. ARK’s research believes that with launch costs below $100 per kilogram, the computing cost of orbital data centers could be about 25% lower than ground-based solutions, without having to deal with grid interconnection latency, approval frictions, or power scarcity issues. Musk has stated the company’s goal is to launch 100 gigawatts of AI compute each year. This argument is still in an early stage, but it is precisely what grants the merged entity a strategic premium that no segmented-sum model can fully capture.

ARK’s research believes the $1.75 trillion IPO target is built on credible development trajectories across SpaceX’s core business segments, and that the structural advantages supporting these trajectories are enduring. Starlink’s user growth curve continues to exceed expectations. The decline in launch costs follows a predictable path under Wright’s Law. The xAI merger adds a strategic dimension to the platform, and no comparable listed company has attempted to replicate it. The forthcoming public S-1 will provide financial transparency, allowing investors to rigorously test these assumptions. ARK believes the fundamentals can stand up to such scrutiny.

Can Elon Musk’s goals be achieved?

ARK’s investment framework is based on a simple premise: a bold technological vision is worth taking seriously—if there is a demonstrable cost-curve decline and accelerating adoption to support it—even if the market consensus remains skeptical.

By this standard, SpaceX’s track record deserves respect. Musk’s fully reusable rocket goal was once viewed as impractical by the traditional aerospace industry, but SpaceX has done it. The vision of building global satellite internet for billions of people who lack network coverage was considered financially infeasible; Starlink proved the opposite. The company has deployed more than 10,000 Starlink satellites in low Earth orbit, serving more than 10 million users, and reached cash-flow breakeven in 2023.

More ambitious goals—including a lunar factory and a network of 1 million orbital data centers—are still some distance from proof of concept. But ARK’s research does not require every goal to be achieved for its investment thesis to hold. With existing business segments developing along current trajectories, that alone is enough to support an attractive investment case. The embedded option value within those bigger ambitions represents upside that ARK’s current valuation model has not yet reflected—this portion of the model is being updated.

In ARK’s view, Musk’s goals are aggressive by any historical standard, and SpaceX has repeatedly demonstrated the ability to compress skeptics’ expected timelines. This is not a guarantee, but ARK believes this historical record itself is a meaningful data point.

Why would investors want SpaceX exposure before the IPO?

This may be the most important question for investors in ARK Venture Fund, and the answers come in several layers.

The window for value creation has shifted earlier. Private companies are going public later and later; in 2025, the median age of U.S. company IPOs was 12 years, up from just 5 years in 1999. Today’s most watched companies create tremendous value while still private. Investors who enter only at the point of going public may have missed the most significant appreciation phase.

IPO price is not the entry price for most investors. When a company the size of SpaceX goes public, the offering and allocation are prioritized for institutional investors. Retail investors who cannot participate directly in IPO allocations will buy on the open market at prices determined by supply and demand on the first day—prices that often far exceed the IPO price. Historical experience shows that high-valuation, high-attention IPOs often undergo large swings after listing before eventually stabilizing at long-term price levels.

ARK Venture Fund investors gain VC-level access. ARK Venture Fund holds SpaceX directly—without intermediaries like secondary markets, special purpose vehicles (SPVs), or structured products that add fee layers and valuation premiums. From SpaceX’s valuation of $350 billion (2024), $800 billion (2025), to $1.25 trillion after the merger, and now the current $1.75 trillion IPO target, investors have enjoyed exposure throughout. This entire value-creation trajectory occurs entirely in the primary market, which is exactly the original intent behind ARK Venture Fund’s design.

What happens to ARK Venture Fund’s holdings after SpaceX goes public?

ARK already anticipated this scenario and its impact on investors when designing the venture-capital fund.

ARK Venture Fund is an evergreen crossover fund, designed to hold positions throughout a company’s full lifecycle—from early and late private stages through the IPO and beyond. SpaceX’s IPO is not an issue the fund needs to “manage”; the investment tool itself is designed for this purpose.

After SpaceX completes the IPO, the fund’s holdings may be constrained by standard lock-up periods, during which ARK’s SpaceX shares cannot be sold. During the lock-up period, new capital injected into ARK Venture Fund will be deployed into other private companies, accelerating rebalancing toward an approximately 80% private exposure target.

Once the lock-up ends, the fund will have full flexibility to manage its SpaceX positions—reducing holdings when appropriate and reallocating capital into the next generation of private innovations across ARK’s five core technology platforms (artificial intelligence, robotics, energy storage, multi-omics, and blockchain).

Any performance of ARK Venture Fund holdings—whether public or private—directly reflects in the fund’s net asset value (NAV). SpaceX’s valuation growth in the private stage is reflected in the fund’s NAV in real time. Because of ARK Venture Fund’s cross-stage attribute, this relationship does not change at the IPO. If SpaceX lists at a higher valuation, ARK Venture Fund investors benefit accordingly; if it lists at a lower valuation, investors bear the impact. For long-term investors, the IPO represents an important liquidity event in a company’s lifecycle, and the advantage of ARK Venture Fund lies in taking positions ahead of the opportunity for re-pricing in the public market.

ARK Venture Fund’s portfolio goes far beyond SpaceX. Current holdings include OpenAI, Anthropic, Neuralink, Databricks, Replit, Crusoe, Radiant, Boom, Lambda, Discord, and a total of more than 50 private companies. If SpaceX’s IPO goes through, it will be a major milestone, and it will also release capital and portfolio flexibility, allowing ARK to continue building the most attractive private innovation portfolio it believes is accessible to ordinary investors.

Important Information

At the time of publication of this article, SpaceX’s IPO application is still a confidential registration-statement draft. The final valuation, timing, and structure have not been confirmed. The public S-1 prospectus has not yet been released. All cited data reflect estimates from public reporting and ARK’s independent research. This article does not constitute investment advice.

Holdings may change at any time. This does not constitute a recommendation to buy, sell, or hold any specific securities.