for which dual-class structures apply. In the absence of change, responsible investors must weigh the immense financial upside of heavily oversubscribed IPOs against the lack of independent board oversight and accountability. Governments and regulators should take notice, too. The hubris is not in believing transformative technology can be built. It is in believing that individual judgment is the appropriate final line of defence. Anthropic’s Mythos preview last month showed that regulators are already struggling to keep up. Future AI rules must be designed with these corporate structures in mind. Backstops must not be removed precisely when they are most needed. ■ Gill Whitehead is a visiting policy fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute and a member of the advisory council of Frontier Economics. This article was downloaded by zlibrary from https://www.economist.com//by-invitation/2026/05/21/the-ipo-wave-will-enshrine-the- ai-gods-control-over-the-future
SpaceX has initiated the biggest ever public offering Elon Musk is again going all-in on an unproven technology—data centres in space May 21st 2026 IT IS A launch of a more bureaucratic sort than normal for SpaceX, but still characteristically spectacular. On May 20th, after America’s financial markets had closed, Elon Musk, the rocketry firm’s founder and the world’s richest man, lit the blue touch paper on the biggest initial public offering ever. Documents filed with American regulators pave the way for SpaceX, which has conquered space but is spending a fortune on artificial intelligence (ai), to make its debut on the NASDAQ exchange in June. Mr Musk had hoped to mark the occasion with a test flight of the latest version of the firm’s gigantic, troublesome Starship rocket, upon whose
stainless-steel frame the company’s astronomical ambitions rest. But the test, originally scheduled for May 19th, has slipped repeatedly. As The Economist went to press, Starship was due to fly on May 21st. Its success or failure could have a big impact on the IPO. For many years SpaceX had dismissed the idea of an IPO. “We can’t go public until we’re flying regularly to Mars,” said Gwynne Shotwell, the firm’s chief operating officer, in 2018. Mr Musk has long argued that public markets are too short-termist and unimaginative for a firm whose goal is eventually to build a city on Mars. But getting to Mars is expensive. The $75bn or so SpaceX hopes to raise from investors would far exceed the record sum raised by Saudi Aramco, an oil giant, when it went public in 2019 (see chart 1 ). SpaceX’s target valuation of around $1.75trn is more than 90 times the $18.7bn in revenue the firm brought in last year. (Tesla, Mr Musk’s electric-vehicle company, trades at a mere 16 times revenue.) Since its founding in 2002—with little more than “carpet and a Mariachi band”, as Mr Musk once joked—SpaceX has elbowed aside incumbents such as Boeing and Lockheed Martin and left government space agencies in the dust. These days it runs the world’s biggest space programme. Its
pioneering re-usable rockets carry almost 90% of everything that goes into space (see chart 2). Starlink, its satellite-broadband service, boasts nearly 10,000 satellites, over two-thirds of the total in orbit, and more than 10m customers. As Mike Grace, the boss of Longshot, a space startup, puts it, SpaceX “owns the solar system right now, and the rest of us just rent it”. Mr Musk thinks he has found an even bigger market for SpaceX to dominate: ai. He believes that AI’s appetite for computing power cannot be satisfied by earthly data centres, which are often impeded by power shortages, red tape and opposition from a distrustful public. Along with several other AI bigwigs, he reckons those problems can be solved by putting data centres in space. He argues that SpaceX, with its unmatched ability to carry things off the planet, is the firm to make it happen. The scale of his ambition is outlined in the firm’s regulatory filings. Mr Musk’s pay depends on SpaceX’s valuation rising even further (to as much as $7.5trn); on the firm putting 100 terawatts of computing power into orbit (about 1,000 times the total of every data centre on Earth today); and on building a Martian city with at least a million inhabitants. Could anything remotely like that come to pass? The paperwork reveals a firm with a fast-growing money-spinner in the form of Starlink, which
brought in $4.4bn in operating profit in 2025—but also a money pit that is growing even faster. In January SpaceX merged with xAI, Mr Musk’s AI firm, which lost $6.4bn in 2025 as it raced to build computing infrastructure. Partly as a result, SpaceX’s capital spending almost quintupled last year compared with 2023, to more than $20bn. Mr Musk seems to have calculated that, even with Starlink, this bill could not be met with private money alone. But some investors may hesitate to pour cash into an AI lab that is a pipsqueak compared with such rivals as Anthropic and OpenAI. SpaceX’s filings say AI makes up 93% of its claimed “total addressable market” of $28.5trn. If this gigantic bet on AI-from-space is to pay off, at least three things must happen. Starship, which is already behind schedule, must be made to work. Starlink must generate more cash. And orbital data centres must offer big advantages to an industry that is already investing astronomical sums in Earth-bound computers. Start with Starship. The gargantuan rocket, the heaviest flying object ever built, is “vital to SpaceX’s future”, says Caleb Henry of Quilty Space, a firm of analysts. It is supposed to finish the revolution that the Falcon 9, SpaceX’s current launch vehicle, began: transforming space flight from something that is rare, bespoke and expensive into something cheap, mass- produced and routine. Before SpaceX, most rockets were disposable, flown once and then dumped into the ocean or abandoned in space. Mr Musk likens that to building a plane, flying it once and then scrapping it. Half of every Falcon 9, by contrast, is designed to be re-used. After separating from the upper stage the rocket’s lower portion can fly back to its launch site or a waiting ship and land on its own tail. It took SpaceX five years, and plenty of crashes, to pull off its first successful landing in 2015. But these days, it is routine. SpaceX conducted 165 Falcon 9 launches in 2025, a number that would have seemed impossible even five years ago. Some boosters have flown more than 20 times. That has helped SpaceX slash the cost of going to space. It charges $74m for a Falcon 9 flight, which can take 17.5 tonnes into orbit. That works out to about $4,200 per kg—about 85% less than what incumbents such as United Launch Alliance, a joint venture between Boeing and Lockheed Martin, used
to charge. (The actual cost to SpaceX is thought to be much lower, perhaps around $1,000 a kilo.) Starship aims to drive that down even further, partly by making the rocket’s payload as big as 200 tonnes, but mostly by making the second stage re- usable as well. The filing documents suggest a goal of $185 a kilo. But making it work has not been easy. “Starship was supposed to take over from Falcon 9 in 2023 or 2024,” says Tim Farrar, who runs TMF Associates, a satellite-industry analysis firm. It is not just SpaceX that is frustrated by the delays. NASA is waiting for a modified Starship to ferry humans to the moon as part of its Artemis programme. SpaceX has on several occasions flown Starship’s booster stage back to its launch site and caught it with robotic “chopstick” arms mounted on the launch tower. Re-using the second stage, though, is far harder. It travels much farther and faster, and must survive temperatures above 1,000°C as it re-enters the atmosphere at speeds of 8km a second or more. Speaking recently on a podcast, Mr Musk noted that several second stages have managed controlled splashdowns at sea, but their heat shields were damaged, he said, and so “not re-usable without a lot of work”. The Space Shuttle—the industry’s previous big attempt at re-use—suffered from similar problems. Fixing the damaged heat-shield took weeks or months. Mr Musk, in contrast, hopes the same Starship might eventually fly several times a day. Starship’s main job will be to bolster Starlink, the fastest-growing and only profitable part of SpaceX’s business. Since its debut in 2021 the service has signed up airlines, shipping firms and more than 10m individual customers, revolutionised warfare in Ukraine and spawned a secretive offshoot called Starshield for government customers. The firm’s newest “direct-to-cell” (D2C) satellites can communicate directly with smartphones and other devices on the ground, with no need for the special pizza-box-sized antennas that its residential plans require. Starlink’s revenue grew by 50% between 2024 and 2025, from $7.6bn to $11.4bn. There is clearly more room for growth, says Mr Farrar. He notes that in one 80-day period in 2025 the firm added 1m new customers. He thinks Starlink