SpaceX's IPO Is Here. Go In With Your Eyes Open.

I have questions. You should too.

There are two conversations worth having about the SpaceX IPO. The first is about valuation. The second is about something bigger than valuation. Both matter, and both are uncomfortable in different ways.

The Numbers First

SpaceX is listing at a valuation of ₹168 lakh crore. To put that in context, you are paying 94 times what the company earns in an entire year. Not 94 times the profit. 94 times the revenue.

There is no clean precedent for this among the world’s most valuable companies. Even the most aggressively priced technology listings of the past decade did not approach this multiple on revenue.

SpaceX pitches itself as a platform for orbit. Satellite internet through Starlink, rocket launches, defence contracts, and eventually the infrastructure for human life beyond Earth. It is a genuinely extraordinary set of ambitions.

But ambition is not the same as earnings. And at 94 times revenue, you are not buying a business. You are buying a story. Stories can go higher on listing day. They can also come down very hard when the market asks for proof.

Listing gains are impossible to predict with any reliability. In moments of genuine market excitement, there is no ceiling on how high something can go in the short term. But what rises purely on sentiment has to eventually justify itself with real numbers. SpaceX has not done that yet at this valuation.

Go in with your eyes open, knowing exactly what you are paying and why.

The Question Worth Asking

The valuation is the investment conversation. There is a separate conversation that connects to it and that I find harder to ignore.

SpaceX’s founding vision is the colonization of Mars. The idea that humanity needs a second planet, and that building civilization elsewhere is the right long term ambition for our species. I understand why this captures the imagination.

It is genuinely grand in scale, and there is something compelling about a civilization that refuses to accept its own limitations.

But when I zoom out, I find myself sitting with a question that does not have a comfortable answer: for whom, exactly, is this vision designed?

The ticket on that spaceship will not be affordable for most people whose money is funding this IPO today. The resources being consumed to build toward that vision, the energy, the capital, the emissions, are being drawn from a planet that is already under serious strain. And the timeline for any of this benefiting ordinary people remains distant and uncertain.

Watch the listing. Understand what you are buying. And ask yourself whether the story you are paying for is one you actually believe in, at the price you are being asked to pay for it.

This is my opinion. What is yours? Tell me in the comments.