The SpaceX IPO is unlike anything public markets have seen before. With a Nasdaq listing under the ticker, SPCX, targeting mid-June 2026 (a fixed offer price of $135 per share and ambitions to raise up to $75 billion at a valuation of $1.75–$2 trillion), it would dwarf every IPO in history, including Saudi Aramco’s $29 billion debut in 2019. Prediction markets on Polymarket are assigning a 98% probability that SpaceX closes its first day of trading above a $1 trillion market cap, with traders split almost evenly between a $1.5-2T and a $2-2.5T closing valuation. This is, by any measure, an historic moment. But before investors get swept up in the excitement, it is worth stepping back and asking three uncomfortable questions that the financial media has largely ignored. What has the decade-long era of net equity buybacks done to the function of public markets? Is there actually enough capital left in the system to absorb the avalanche of AI mega-IPOs now queuing up? And what does it mean when a man with 42% of the equity gets to control 85% of the votes?
Source:X
The lost decade of capital formation
Public equity markets exist, in theory, to channel savings into productive enterprises. Companies raise capital, invest it, create jobs and generate returns. That is the textbook. The reality of the past decade has been almost the precise opposite as, since the global financial crisis, the dominant use of public markets by large US corporations has been to retire their own shares rather than issue new ones. As far back as 2014, the Bank for International Settlements noted that US share buybacks had approached their pre-crisis peak of nearly $950 billion in the two-year period 2013-14, with net new equity actually falling by at least $610 billion once repurchases were netted against issuance. The US corporate sector was, in aggregate, a net destroyer of public equity, not a creator of it. And that trend has only accelerated. Stock buybacks continued with an estimated $1.2 trillion being bought back, according to JP Morgan, with expectations of surpassing $1.8 trillion in 2026. This figure dwarf’s new equity issuance through IPOs, secondary offerings and employee stock option grants, and represents 2-3% of total US equity market capitalisation (50% to 100% more than the annual pay out from dividends). A dramatic example of this is that of Warren Buffet’s shareholding in American Express (Amex), which has doubled in the late 1990s from 10% to over now 20%, simply because Amex has been offering share buybacks for decades (which Buffet has refused, hence his % ownership has grown).
So, why do companies do this? The honest answer has little to do with shareholder value theory and rather more to do with how executives get paid. When compensation is structured around earnings per share (EPS) targets and share price performance, the basis for most executive bonuses and long-term incentive plans - there is a powerful incentive to shrink the denominator rather than grow the numerator. Buying back shares mechanically boosts EPS without the business needing to earn a single dollar more in profit. Directors hit their targets, options vest, bonuses are paid and the underlying business may have invested in nothing. As one analysis noted, executive stock compensation is generally based on share price and not market capitalisation, creating incentives to return capital to shareholders by foregoing marginally positive projects - or through the issuance of debt, effectively cannibalising the future to flatter the present. The consequence is that, for the better part of fifteen years, the S&P 500 has functioned less as a mechanism for allocating capital to growing businesses than as a vast share repurchase programme underwritten by cheap debt and, more recently, by AI-driven profit expectations. Public markets have been a place where capital goes to be extinguished, not created.
Now everyone wants to raise capital at once
Into this environment, the AI industry is about to arrive with a very large bucket, and SpaceX is not alone; three of the most valuable private companies in the world are preparing to hit public markets in rapid succession. Moreover, SpaceX is targeting a $75 billion raise. OpenAI, currently generating over $20 billion in annualised revenue but losing an estimated $14 billion per year, is eyeing late 2026 or early 2027. Anthropic, which has crossed $30 billion in annualised revenue on extraordinary growth, is in talks to raise $50 billion at a $900 billion valuation ahead of a potential October listing. In total, three companies are preparing to raise close to $200 billion from public markets within a matter of months. Certainly, this is already generating concern on Wall Street. The time windows for these three major IPOs are extremely concentrated, creating resonance with historical empirical cases of the IPO liquidity crowding-out effect. When very large issuances absorb the available pool of institutional capital, those smaller companies seeking to list face a harder road, higher required yields, lower valuations or the decision not to go public at all. The broader private market backdrop makes this more acute. Around 50% of global venture capital went to AI in 2025; furthermore, that share jumped to approximately 80% in Q1 2026, powered by giant financings for OpenAI, Anthropic and xAI. Meanwhile, only seventeen unicorns went public in 2025, leaving $4.3 trillion of value locked in private market and thousands of companies still priced off the 2021 vintage that no longer reflects reality. The question is not simply whether there is demand for SpaceX shares, there clearly is. The question is whether the gravitational pull of AI mega-issuances leaves anything for the rest of the queue. For companies outside the AI orbit, consumer businesses, industrials, mid-market fintech (anything that cannot credibly claim to be transforming the world with artificial intelligence), the IPO window that SpaceX might theoretically re-open could, in practice, become narrower than ever.
One man, 85% of the votes
The third and, perhaps, most important question raised by the SpaceX IPO is not financial at all - it is structural. SpaceX’s S-1 filing with the SEC confirms that Elon Musk holds 12.3% of Class A shares and 93.6% of Class B shares, which carry ten votes per share rather than one (giving him a combined voting power of 85.1%). Public shareholders purchasing Class A shares will gain an economic stake in the company, but no meaningful ability to influence outcomes on any matter requiring shareholder approval. The prospectus also confirms that SpaceX will claim controlled company status, exempting it from those stock exchange requirements mandating that the majority of the board be independent. Musk will serve simultaneously as CEO, CTO and board chairman, and will retain the power to elect, remove or fill vacancies among Class B directors. Moreover, mandatory arbitration clauses further limit shareholders’ legal recourse. This is not without precedent - dual-class structures are common amongst US tech giants such as Meta and Alphabet, typically giving founders 10 or 20 votes per share versus one for ordinary investors. Musk himself has been pursuing a similar arrangement at Tesla, where he has publicly argued that 25% voting control is appropriate, noting that it is “not so much that I could control the company, even if I go bonkers.” At SpaceX, he has achieved something far more powerful than 25%.
The SpaceX structure raises a question that markets have so far declined to take seriously: what is the actual value of shares that carry no governance rights? Investors are being asked to take on the full economic risk of the enterprise whilst ceding all strategic control to a single individual who also controls Tesla, X, xAI and the Boring Company, who holds an active political role and whose stated ambitions include colonising Mars. The decision about whether SpaceX’s capital allocation serves shareholders or serves that broader personal agenda rests entirely with one man, regardless of how many public shares are sold. There is a plausible bull case: Musk’s track record at SpaceX is genuinely exceptional. The company generated an estimated $18.7 billion in 2025 revenue and is the only profitable entity among the wave of AI-era mega-IPOs. Starlink is a real business with real margins - the Falcon 9 programme is a genuine engineering triumph. Perhaps founder control, in this specific case, is a reasonable trade for access to a company that would otherwise remain private. But the precedent is troubling. If SpaceX succeeds in raising $75 billion whilst offering public shareholders no governance rights whatsoever, it normalises a template in which the public markets exist purely to provide liquidity and capital to founders (whilst accountability flows in only one direction). The function of markets, price discovery, capital allocation and the disciplining of management through shareholder oversight is effectively suspended. Investors become passengers, not participants. For Digital Bytes readers who follow the governance questions in digital assets and tokenisation closely, the parallel is worth noting. The debates around voting rights, token structures and founder control in the crypto space have always been presented as a deficiency of that sector compared to regulated public markets. The SpaceX IPO suggests the gap may be narrower than assumed.
The bigger picture
Taken together, these three threads - the long era of net buybacks, the AI capital crowding effect and the normalisation of super-voting structures - describe a public equity market that has drifted some distance from its original purpose. Capital is increasingly concentrated, governance is increasingly founder-controlled and the capacity of markets to allocate resources broadly and efficiently is increasingly questionable. SpaceX may well be a spectacular investment: but it is worth remembering - as the hype builds, buying a share in SpaceX next week means accepting that you have no say in how your money is used, and that the man spending it has a fair few other things on his mind as well.
This article first appeared in Digital Bytes (9th of June, 2026), a weekly newsletter by Jonny Fry of Team Blockchain.