SpaceX just completed the largest IPO in human history. Whether it is the greatest investment ever made or the greatest illusion ever sold depends entirely on a figure smaller than a monthly streaming subscription.
On the morning of 12 June 2026, a 24-year-old in Mumbai opened her Robinhood account and bought shares in a company that, by market close, was worth more than the entire GDP of Italy. She was not alone. Robinhood reported record-breaking platform traffic on SpaceX’s debut day, as millions of retail investors participated in what became, by any measure, the most consequential public offering in the history of capital markets. SpaceX confirmed it had raised approximately $85.7 billion in gross proceeds the largest US IPO on record with the listing reaching a post-IPO valuation of $2.3 trillion. To put that in context, Saudi Aramco held the IPO record for six years after raising $29.4 billion in 2019. SpaceX nearly tripled it before lunch.
The obvious question the one serious investors are actually arguing about is whether this makes sense. The company that just became the most expensively valued aerospace business in history reported $18 billion in revenue in 2025 and a net loss of $4.9 billion. It is burning money at scale. Its largest shareholder controls the company through a dual-class share structure that renders public investors largely powerless. And at a $2 trillion valuation, the implied price-to-sales ratio is approximately 107 times revenue substantially higher than any leading tech company’s median. And yet the smartest money in the world queued up anyway. To understand why, you have to understand what SpaceX actually built and then confront the one number that determines whether the entire thesis holds.
The Technology That Changed Everything
The argument for SpaceX begins not with Starlink or Mars, but with a rocket booster landing itself on a floating drone ship in the Atlantic Ocean. When SpaceX first achieved that in December 2015, it was not a stunt. It was a structural break in the economics of an industry that had remained essentially unchanged since the Apollo era. Before reusability, building a rocket cost $400 million or more per launch. Once you fired it, it was gone. Reusable rockets like the Falcon 9 cut that cost by approximately 70%, bringing satellite deployment down from roughly $500 million per satellite in geostationary orbit to $250,000 to $500,000 in low Earth orbit. The cost per kilogram to orbit fell from around $10,000 to roughly $2,500 a 75% reduction.
The consequences were not merely financial. They were strategic. SpaceX achieved this by vertically integrating 70% of Falcon 9 production in-house and replacing a $100,000 industry-standard radio with a $5,000 commercial alternative a philosophy of disciplined cost engineering applied to a sector accustomed to cost-plus government contracts where efficiency was irrelevant. The result: SpaceX now accounts for roughly 85% of US orbital launches and completed 165 Falcon 9 missions in 2025 its sixth consecutive annual launch record including a single booster flying for a record 29th time.
That launch dominance was not the business. It was the delivery mechanism for the business. Every third Falcon 9 that climbs into orbit is placing another batch of Starlink satellites into a constellation that, by February 2026, had surpassed 10.3 million active customers across 160 countries. Starlink grew from 2.3 million subscribers in 2023 to more than 10 million in three years a compounding rate that almost no consumer technology has matched outside of social media. In 2025, Starlink generated $11.4 billion in revenue, up 48% year on year, and $4.4 billion in operating profit making it the only profitable segment in the entire company and the engine financing everything else.
This is the core innovation that investors are actually buying: SpaceX turned its rocket company into a subscription business. Starlink does not sell launches. It sells monthly connectivity to fishing boats in the Pacific, hospitals in sub-Saharan Africa, military units in conflict zones, and airlines over the Atlantic. The recurring revenue model is the reason public market investors who assign far higher multiples to software and subscriptions than to aerospace hardware are willing to tolerate a $2 trillion valuation on $18 billion in sales.
The $66 Number
More than 60% of SpaceX’s revenue comes from Starlink, and the metric that determines whether the entire valuation is justified or inflated is a single figure: average revenue per user, which currently stands at $66 per month and is falling.
This is the number that splits the investment community in two. In 2023, Starlink’s average revenue per user was $99 a month. By 2025 it had fallen 18% to $81, and by Q1 2026 it had declined further to $66 reflecting a deliberate trade of revenue per subscriber for global volume, as SpaceX expanded aggressively into lower-income markets and introduced cheaper consumer tiers
The bulls point out that even as ARPU was declining, Starlink’s operating income spiked 120% to $4.4 billion in 2025 because subscriber numbers surged 347% from 2.3 million to 10.3 million. Volume is outrunning price compression. The bears counter that as the easy, wealthy markets fill up and growth increasingly comes from emerging-market subscribers paying a fraction of US rates, the economics will deteriorate. If ARPU stabilises or recovers if SpaceX can raise prices on its installed base as it began doing in May 2026, adding up to $10 a month the valuation can be justified. If ARPU continues falling faster than subscriber growth can compensate, the $2 trillion number starts looking like a religion rather than an analysis.
The Vision
Beyond the subscription economics lies the reason Elon Musk has spent 24 years and reportedly more than $15 billion on Starship development: a genuinely stated ambition to make humanity a multi-planetary species. The S-1 filing frames SpaceX’s mission as “building the systems and technologies necessary to make life multiplanetary,” and it is not boilerplate. Musk’s compensation package includes 1 billion additional Class B shares vesting only if SpaceX hits market-cap milestones up to $7.5 trillion and establishes a permanent human colony on Mars.
The roadmap is sequential and aggressive. Starship when fully operational can deploy 60 next-generation Starlink satellites in a single launch, a 20-fold improvement over Falcon 9. That alone transforms the economics of building the constellation further. Beyond that, SpaceX’s S-1 envisions a lunar economy encompassing cargo delivery, space tourism, and permanent outposts, before eventually building the infrastructure for Mars. Musk has outlined a plan for approximately 20 Starship missions during the 2028–29 window, 100 during 2030–31, and up to 500 by 2033, with the ultimate goal of delivering one million people to Mars by 2050. The global space economy provides the commercial context for this ambition. The space economy is expected to grow from $630 billion in 2023 to $1.8 trillion by 2035. SpaceX, with its launch dominance, satellite constellation, direct-to-cell mobile partnerships, and AI compute infrastructure including a data centre contract requiring Anthropic to pay $1.25 billion per month through 2029, is positioned to capture a disproportionate share of that expansion. The Starship era if it arrives on schedule unlocks point-to-point Earth travel, orbital manufacturing, and deep-space logistics: markets that do not yet exist but that SpaceX is the only company technically positioned to serve.
By Abhishek Goswami
Legal Intern @Singhania & Co.
College: NMIMS, Navi Mumbai
BBA, LLB
