Following news that Elon Musk might be taking SpaceX public at a possible valuation of $1.5-trillion, commentators hauled out their calculators to determine if it was worth it. Yes, when you consider that SpaceX entirely owns almost all space infrastructure. And traditionally, any monopoly on infrastructure (rails, roads, ports) is where the trillions lie.
A few statistics came across my screen this week that made me blink and re-read. SpaceX launched 165 rockets in 2025. That is nearly one every two days.
And if you think that’s astonishing, consider this. Musk’s new rocket, Starship, will cost customers somewhere around $100–$150 (R1,600–R2,500) per kilogram to launch payloads into Earth’s orbit. That is 10 times cheaper than SpaceX’s current much re-used rocket Falcon.
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And about 50 times cheaper than the French-made Arianne. And 200 times cheaper than Nasa’s SLS. In just two decades, SpaceX has managed to edge out former aerospace heavyweights Boeing, Lockheed and Northrop Grumman to gain 800-pound gorilla status over rocket launches in the United States.
But market share alone understates the structural nature of this dominance. SpaceX launched more rockets in 2025 than the rest of the world combined, put up 75% of everything that went into space and operates a satellite constellation almost 10 times larger than any competitor. Perhaps most significantly, SpaceX remains the only way to get Nasa astronauts into space.
Musk owns the space industry. No one else is even close, nor is there any indication that serious competition is coming, although there are some distant aspirants like Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin (which has managed exactly one launch) and the Chinese government, which must be apoplectic with envy. And because of SpaceX’s mastery of re-usable rockets, no one can get close to is customer pricing and no one else has ever built a re-usable rocket.
SpaceX is so far ahead that the word monopoly does not even apply. The reason these stats are suddenly buzzing around the airwaves hark back to a tweet on 11 December from a guy by the name of Eric Berger, the senior space editor at Ars Technica and a long-time “SpaceX whisperer”. He published an article titled Here’s why I think SpaceX is going public soon.
Elon Musk replied directly to Berger’s post, stating simply: “As usual, Eric is accurate.” Things got hot immediately. Musk had been consistent – SpaceX would never go public. And here he was, confirming it.
Cellphones buzzed. Analysts spreadsheeted. Commentators hypothesised.
Investors hyperventilated. What is this company worth? And how much did it want to raise?
When the figures emerged, there was a beat of stunned silence followed by the cacophony of frenzied conversation. The company would be valued at $1.5-trillion (R25-trillion) from which the company would be raising north of $30- billion (R450-billion). That valuation sits between the GDPs of the Netherlands and Australia.
There has only been one listing of a company which is valued higher, and that was Saudi Aramco in 2019, valued at $1.7 trillion ($30 trillion). It owns most of the world’s oil, while SpaceX owns a couple of rockets and some communications satellites. SpaceX has negligible revenue and profits compared to the giant old oil company.
In what world could this be rational? In the cold hard light of the future of everything, it is.
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