The $1.75T IPO that reprices everything

In the summer of 2004, Google went public at a $23 billion valuation. The IPO was chaotic, the bankers hated the Dutch auction format, and most serious investors thought the price was absurd. Within three years, Google had a $200 billion market cap. Every internet company it touched got repriced upward.

Now replace Google with SpaceX. Replace 2004 with June 2026. And replace $23 billion with $1.75 trillion.

That's the number being floated in deal rooms right now. $1.75 trillion. For context, that's bigger than the entire GDP of Australia. It would make SpaceX the most valuable company ever to debut on a public exchange, and it would land in a market that's still finding its footing after a bruising stretch of macro uncertainty.

Here's what most people are getting wrong about this: they're treating it as a SpaceX story. It isn't. It's a repricing event for an entire category of stocks that institutional money has been ignoring because there was no liquid benchmark to anchor against.

Fund managers don't price things in a vacuum. They compare. Right now, if you want exposure to the orbital launch business, your options are thin. Rocket Lab USA (NASDAQ:RKLB) is the only other company with an operational rocket that reaches orbit. When SpaceX lists at $1.75 trillion, portfolio managers will look at RKLB's current market cap (hovering around $10 billion) and start asking uncomfortable questions about the gap. You don't need RKLB to become SpaceX to think that gap is too wide.

Then there's AST SpaceMobile (NASDAQ:ASTS), which is building satellite broadband that connects directly to regular smartphones — no special hardware required. The thesis is essentially Starlink, but without the dish. SpaceX going public at $1.75 trillion is the loudest possible validation of the satellite broadband model. ASTS is one of the few pure-play public alternatives.

And Intuitive Machines (NASDAQ:LUNR) is a direct SpaceX customer. Their lunar landers ride Falcon 9 rockets. They carry NASA contracts worth billions. When SpaceX IPOs, LUNR becomes part of the story whether it wants to or not.

Now for the honest counterargument, because smart people disagree with this whole framing. The bear case is that SpaceX at $1.75 trillion is so large it actually sucks oxygen out of the room. Institutional capital that flows into the IPO has to come from somewhere — and smaller space-adjacent names might get sold to fund the allocation. There's also the risk that SpaceX's public debut reveals unit economics that make the whole sector look more commoditised than the bulls think.

But here's what I keep coming back to: when Amazon went public, it didn't hurt Walmart's e-commerce ambitions. It created them. The sector-defining IPO usually makes the category real, not smaller.

If SpaceX files before June, the window to own the second-order plays is short. That's not a prediction. That's just the math of how re-ratings work.