Elon Musk Said He Wouldn’t Take SpaceX Public — Two Things That Changed His Mind

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Elon Musk struggled massively with the pressure of Tesla being a public company. Many see the company as an obvious, insane success — especially as it trades at a P/E ratio of 357.29 — but the stress of getting Tesla to profitability and the difficulty dealing with quarterly financial analyst calls (two of which I was given the opportunity to ask live questions on) wore Musk down tremendously and may have led to severe psychological issues and even drug use (based on things Musk has said publicly at various times).

Due to all of that, Musk said he never wanted to take another company public again. When he bought Twitter, he took it private, and after losing a ton of money, he got it merged into xAI to save the day. As those two together got into financial crisis, he got them rolled into SpaceX to save them. Now, however, after years of saying he didn’t want to take SpaceX public, he’s doing so.

“At SpaceX, we never think about the quarter. We never think about it, and we don’t think about the stock price,” Musk said in 2023.

“I don’t think it’s worth going public until you have maybe an extremely stable and predictable revenue stream. At that point, going public is less of an issue because you’re just not going to have these big gyrations,” he also said.

In an email to SpaceX employees in 2013, he said that he didn’t want SpaceX to go public until he already had a transport system to Mars in place. “I am hesitant to foist being public on SpaceX, especially given the long term nature of our mission.” He also shared that Tesla went public because it had to, in order to survive.

So, what has changed? There are two key things that seem to have changed his mind, leading to SpaceX’s coming IPO:

1. SpaceX needs money.
2. Elon Musk is still going to control the company, keeping 85% of voting control of the company.

SpaceX Needs Money

SpaceX got profitable in 2024. It has made a lot of money on its Starlink business. But the company sunk back into the red in 2025, and is sinking much faster in 2026. Furthermore, it already has a ton of cumulative long-term debt.

There are sort of complicated reasons for the financial up and down. Well, basically, SpaceX is now a handful of companies in one, and one is making money while the others are burning cash fast.

Th big picture, as Steve Hanley pointed out this morning, is:

• SpaceX made $791 million in profit in 2024.
• It then had a loss of about $4.9 billion in 2025.
• In the first quarter of 2026, it had a loss of about $4.3 billion.

In addition, its accumulated deficit is around $41 billion.

“SpaceX has lost more than $41 bil­lion since it was foun­ded a quarter-cen­tury ago and is pin­ning its hopes for future profit on a giant rocket being developed in South Texas,” a reported for the Austin American-Statesman writes.

“Last year’s total rev­enue of $18.7 bil­lion was up 33% from a year earlier, the com­pany dis­closed in the fil­ing required of busi­nesses seek­ing to go pub­lic, which provided the first offi­cial look at SpaceX’s fin­an­cial per­form­ance. In the first three months of this year, rev­enue increased to $4.7 bil­lion from $4.1 bil­lion in the same period a year ago.

“But SpaceX lost nearly $5 bil­lion last year, com­pared with a $791 mil­lion profit in 2024, as cap­ital expendit­ures nearly doubled to $20.7 bil­lion, with heavy spend­ing on AI devel­op­ment. SpaceX said that in the first three months of this year, it lost almost as much money as it did in all of 2025, record­ing a $4.3 bil­lion loss.”

To reiterate, the AI side of its business led to losses in 2025 despite record revenue, and rolling xAI into the company in 2026 (and assuming its massive debt) led to a lot more losses in Q1.

Frankly, SpaceX is running out of cash, fast, and this is seemingly a key thing that has forced Elon’s hand and led to the SpaceX IPO.

Burning through $41 billion, and now $4.3 billion in one quarter, SpaceX needs money.

Remember what I wrote above regarding Tesla — Tesla went public because it had to, in order to survive. Years after it went public, it was again in a financial crisis. If the company couldn’t ramp up production of the Model 3, it was going to go bankrupt. According to Musk himself, the company was approximately two weeks away from running out of money before they finally got things to click and ramped up production. Frankly, as much as Tesla is now a huge success, it was days away from collapse. In another timeline, the short sellers would have been right and Tesla shareholders would have lost essentially all of their financial investments in the company.

Will an IPO save the day for SpaceX, and will the company end up being massively profitable down the road? Or will SpaceX face extreme scrutiny as a public company, run out of money, and crash hard? Who knows?

There’s an excellent neutral analysis on LinkedIn explaining the bull case and the bear case for the company and its stock. No matter where you sit on the matter, I encourage you to check it out.

A couple of other comments I ran across on a reddit thread also stood out to me. Here’s one:

“Their cumulative losses are $37B and they have $29B in debt. They need this IPO to remain solvent at all, in the face of the current burn rate.

“And even the IPO will only provide about a third to a quarter of the investment they actually need to build out the business plan outlined in the prospectus.

“We knew the hype machine would be in overdrive for this IPO, and it really is. But like Tesla, the hype can be sustained in the form of a meme stock, as long as enough people are true believers. This is no different.”

Excellent points. From a strictly objective perspective, SpaceX is hugely in debt and needs an enormous amount of money — much, much more money — to achieve its goals. However, it could be the biggest meme stock in history. That’s not necessarily a slight, but a critical factor in its potential long-term viability. As the exalted prince of prose Steve Hanley mentioned to me earlier today next to our chrome-lined avocado and cucumber juice cooler, “I don’t know what to do with the SpaceX story. It’s like FSD — it’s real if you believe it and the believers don’t want to hear otherwise.”

And, remember, now there’s serious talk of Tesla and SpaceX merging…. The two biggest meme stocks in history combined? What could that mean?

Anyway, back to the money, this is the other reddit comment I was referring to:

“The entire satellite constellation has to be replaced every 5 years, its recurring charge being so low depends on Starship flying 100-150 tones to orbit at $15 million per starship launch and fully reusable.

“$15 million per fully reusable launch starting this year? They spent $1 billion on starship development in just the first 3 months of this year, almost double the run the year before, it’s almost June and v3 only launched with at most 40 tonnes, no relight, orbit, and lost several engines.

“I would say for the $1.7 trillion vutation,m to budget 1-2 years to get production startship to 100-150 tons and the super fast turn around. It took years to bring the Falcon 9 turnaround to something similar.”

As that Austin American-Statesman article said, SpaceX “is pin­ning its hopes for future profit on a giant rocket being developed in South Texas.”

Coming back to that LinkedIn article from by Kris Barney, CFA, the bull case that was presented certainly does a good job of showing why the IPO is so large and why it will likely be seen as a massive success, initially at least. Sure, SpaceX needs cash, but it will all pay off it things go according to plan. However, it’s not one “if” that has to come true, but several of them. SpaceX could be the juggernaut Musk hopes it will be, or it could crash and burn like a rocket that just had one fatal flaw. Here’s more from that article on why SpaceX all of a sudden has to do what Musk never wanted it to do, raise money on the public market:

“Now look at the direction of the losses. This is the part the bulls wave away. The losses aren’t shrinking as the company matures — they’re accelerating. SpaceX lost $4.9 billion in all of 2025, and then lost $4.3 billion in the first quarter of 2026 alone. Why? Because in February it absorbed xAI, a business burning roughly $6 billion in 2025 and on pace for $10 billion in 2026. A profitable launch-and-internet company chose to staple itself to a cash incinerator. Some SpaceX investors openly called the xAI and X acquisitions bailouts of Musk’s other ventures. Whatever you call it, the result is the same: Starlink’s profits are being shoveled directly into AI capex, and the consolidated company loses money — with $29 billion in debt, much of it floating-rate, and a Goldman bridge loan drawn in March to keep the build going.

“The cash cow is already slowing where it counts. Starlink’s subscriber count is doubling, yes — but its average revenue per user has fallen from roughly $99 a month in 2023 to the mid-$60s by early 2026. That’s the tell. To keep growing subscribers, they’re cutting price, and competition is about to make that worse, not better. Amazon’s constellation is finally deploying. China is launching state-backed mega-constellations explicitly to break Starlink’s grip, with 15,000-plus satellites planned. The monopoly window is closing precisely as the company asks you to pay a monopoly multiple.”

Hmm….

If things go south for SpaceX, Musk is going to have a lot of headaches talking to stock analysts on quarterly conference calls. Or will he?

Elon Musk Will Still Control SpaceX Fully

The other big reason why Musk decided he could take SpaceX public is that he’s still going to fully control the company. He’s going to retain 85% of voting control of the stock. Anything he wants SpaceX to do, he gets SpaceX to do. Merge SpaceX with Tesla? Sure. Build a space station for 15 kids he’s had with 5 women? Go for it. The latter is dramatically unlikely, of course, but the point is that he can still basically have SpaceX do anything he wants.

If you thought Musk had too unchecked much control over Tesla, just forget about it when it comes to SpaceX (or SpaceX plus Tesla).

As Steve Hanley pointed out, SpaceX is going to be a “controlled company” even after it goes public. It’s not going to be a shareholder-influenced public company in the way that people typically think about a public company. There is “no independent board majority and no mechanism for outside shareholders to act if the key person is distracted, incapacitated, conflicted, or simply wrong,” as the LinkedIn article shares.

A handful of SpaceX insiders who have long been part of Elon Musk’s private supporting network at the company look set to make an absolute killing, as Steve explained partly in this article and then further in this one. They’ve got nothing to worry about. However, for anyone else joining the party post-IPO, you are hitching your wagon to a giant rocket ship that is making a lot of money but burning a lot more each quarter. Can you get to Mars, or at least the moon, before the company runs out of cash to burn and comes crashing down to Earth? That is the question. Oh, and a key point: Elon Musk is the astronaut flying the ship, and no one will be able to replace him no matter what happens in the years to come.