By Niket Nishant and Manya Saini
May 20 (Reuters) – As Elon Musk’s SpaceX races toward what could be the largest IPO in history, its filing delivers a rare mix of hard financial data and bold ambitions of exploring the frontiers of space.
The filing’s references to lunar missions and Mars settlement echo the popular space-age futuristic themes of “The Martian” and “Interstellar,” while grounding those ambitions in the more familiar language of commercial space development.
The company identified asteroid mining, in-orbit manufacturing and energy production on the moon and Mars as potential future opportunities, even though these ventures appear nowhere near feasibility.
The language in the filing at times veered from conventional corporate disclosure to warnings of existential peril.
“We do not want humans to have the same fate as dinosaurs,” the company said, as it made a case for interplanetary travel.
The part-balance-sheet, part-science-fiction nature of the paperwork is just one of several signs that show how unprecedented SpaceX’s IPO truly is, in terms of size, ambition and business model.
It is also consistent with Musk’s public persona. The billionaire founder and CEO of the company has developed a reputation for being unconventional, which has earned him a loyal following but also unsettled investors at times.
“Love him or hate him, Musk is definitely not boring, and his capacity to spin business narratives that seem outlandish at first hearing but become conventional wisdom later clearly adds to the allure of SpaceX,” said Aswath Damodaran, a finance professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business.
Projections deemed excessively rosy can backfire, as hard-nosed investors are often more interested in tangible details about a company’s business than grandiose visions.
SpaceX acknowledged the risk, warning that many of its initiatives depend on technologies that are either nascent or do not yet exist, and may never become commercially viable.
Musk’s solid track record at Tesla, however, has turned some of his hardened skeptics into believers, with “never bet against Elon” becoming a common saying on Wall Street.
Since SpaceX has no obvious public market peer, the projections may be treated as a necessary part of the pitch rather than a flaw.
“Very little captures public imagination like space travel, and I think investors will want that in their portfolios. SpaceX will be pitching itself as a generational company, one with a long-term vision for investors to hold onto for 20 or 30+ years,” said Matt Kennedy, senior strategist at Renaissance Capital, a provider of IPO-focused research and ETFs.
The IPO is expected to raise a record $75 billion at a valuation of roughly $1.75 trillion, placing SpaceX among a handful of the world’s elite kilocorn companies and sending ripples across nearly every corner of the equity markets.
The rocket and satellite maker accelerated the timeline for its IPO earlier this month. It is now aiming to list its shares as early as June 12 on the Nasdaq, Reuters reported, citing sources.
(Reporting by Manya Saini and Niket Nishant in Bengaluru; Editing by Noor Zainab Hussain and Anil D’Silva)
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