SpaceX Left a Blank Field Where Investor Trust Should Go

SpaceX filed its S-1 on May 20. The document asks investors to trust a company that lost $4.27 billion in a single quarter, lists a satellite internet division that made $4.4 billion in operating income all of last year, and then leaves blank the field for the percentage of voting power its founder will retain.

That blank field is the most honest number in the filing.

SpaceX applied to list on Nasdaq under the ticker SPCX, targeting a $1.75 trillion valuation — the largest IPO in history if it clears. The dual-class share structure is now public: Class A common stock carries one vote per share; Class B carries ten votes per share, and Class B elects the majority of the board. Per the SEC filing, SpaceX will be a controlled company under Nasdaq rules. What the filing does not say is what percentage of total voting power that structure gives Elon Musk. The field reads blank in the preliminary document — a hole left by lawyers, not an oversight. Whatever the number is, SpaceX's own counsel decided it was material enough to flag rather than omit.

The gap between what the filing says and what investors are being asked to believe is the actual story. The companies that spent a decade avoiding public markets are opening their doors now because their capital architecture — the interlocking stack of cash-burning rockets, cash-printing satellites, and unproven orbital compute — is becoming legible to the specific kind of investor they now need. Starlink funds the rocket development; the rockets fund the orbital infrastructure; the orbital infrastructure funds the next generation of AI compute. Public markets are not being asked to bet on a finished product. They are being asked to fund the architecture.

The numbers behind the architecture are not small. Starlink posted $11.4 billion in 2025 revenue, growing nearly 50 percent year-over-year, with segment operating income of $4.4 billion. In Q1 2026, Starlink generated $3.26 billion in revenue, or 69 percent of SpaceX's total quarterly sales. One division is a cash cow. The rest of the company is a research budget with a launch manifest. SpaceX reported a net loss of $4.9 billion on $18.67 billion in revenue for 2025, per Axios.

The bull case rests on Starlink's growth trajectory and the orbital compute thesis — the idea that space-based data centers could eventually deliver compute at roughly 25 percent lower cost than terrestrial alternatives, per ARK Invest. Orbital compute is five to seven years from commercial viability, per MoffettNathanson analysts, who noted that the capital requirements for a full-fledged buildout are simply enormous. That is the bet. Public capital is the fuel.

The counterforce is the size of the hole the blank field is meant to obscure. SpaceX merged xAI into the corporate structure at a $250 billion valuation while the AI division was losing money at a rate that would be terminal for any company without a cash-printing sibling. xAI burned approximately $9.5 billion in the first nine months of 2025, per Macro Notes. These numbers do not resolve. They compound.

OpenAI is moving toward its own public listing with a different version of the same architecture problem. CFO Sarah Friar confirmed the company exited 2025 at an annualized revenue run rate above $20 billion, against estimated full-year actual revenue of approximately $13.1 billion, per Investing.com. OpenAI projected losses of $14 billion in 2026 and does not expect cash-flow breakeven before 2029. Deutsche Bank noted that public markets will need to value AI companies with opaque economics once they open their financial statements to scrutiny, per CNBC.

John Blank at Zacks called the cluster of mega-IPOs a market top signal, speaking to CNBC. He may be right about the signal. He is probably wrong about the cause. These are not companies cashing out at the top. They are companies betting that the public markets they avoided for a decade are now the right instrument for the next phase of their capital structure — and the amended S-1 filings in the weeks ahead will show whether that bet was legible to anyone besides themselves.

What to watch: the amended S-1 will fill in the blank Musk voting percentage field and may revise the target valuation. If the revised number lands below $1 trillion, or if the June 12 listing date slips, the capital architecture story gets harder to tell — because the architecture requires public trust to complete the circuit. OpenAI's IPO timeline will be the second signal. If either company walks back its listing plans, the frame collapses into a different story: not loading up, but retreating.