SpaceX’s $2 Trillion Gas-Fired IPO

Elon Musk’s rockets, AI ambitions, and dreams of "interplanetary industrialization" all depend on an old-fashioned fuel: the queen of the hydrocarbons.

A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket taking off from Florida on May 25. Credit: SpaceX.

In 1964, Nikolai Kardashev published a paper called “Transmission of Information by Extraterrestrial Civilizations.” In it, the Russian astrophysicist (1932-2019) detailed what has become known as the Kardashev scale, which classifies hypothetical civilizations by the amount of power they can harness: planetary, stellar, and galactic. The concept is obviously true: the more energy a society can harness, the more advanced it can become. Kardashev’s idea has since become one of the most-cited conceptual tools in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.

There are three levels on Kardashev’s scale: Type I, II, and III. The first is a civilization that can use all the energy available on its home planet. For planet Earth, that figure is roughly the power of all the sunlight hitting our world, which is about 10¹⁶ watts. Type II societies can harness all of the energy output of their parent star, estimated at 10²⁶ watts in the case of the Sun. And Type III civilizations can harness the energy resources of an entire galaxy, estimated at 10³⁶ watts.

Among his myriad predilections, Elon Musk is obsessed with the Kardashev scale.

In 2024, he declared, “Once you understand Kardashev Scale, it becomes utterly obvious that essentially all energy generation will be solar.” He made a similar comment in 2025. In February, he cited the Kardashev scale again while on the Dwarkesh Podcast, saying if “you’re going to climb the Kardashev scale,” the only way to do it is “to go to space.”

Last week, SpaceX filed its Form S-1 in advance of its initial public offering. The 308-page document includes three mentions of the Kardashev scale. Including this one:

We believe the next paradigm shift for humanity is the creation of a resilient, perpetually expanding spacefaring civilization that drives continuous innovation across new frontiers, ultimately propelling us to Kardashev Type II status — a civilization that harnesses the full energy output of our Sun.

The S-1 is filled with lofty language about paradigm shifts, making life interplanetary, humanity’s future, and spacefaring. Indeed, SpaceX’s IPO is fueling exospheric hype along with serious questions about the company’s extraterrestrial valuations. The superlatives are many. The IPO could be the biggest in history and give SpaceX a market capitalization of $1.7 trillion to $2 trillion. The company could also raise as much as $75 billion, another record. Upon going public, it would also become the sixth-most-valuable publicly traded company in the US.

But by traditional metrics, SpaceX’s valuation is nothing short of loony. SpaceX’s 2025 revenue was $18.7 billion. At a valuation of $1.75 trillion, the company’s stock will be trading at 93 times current revenue. Again, that’s a multiple of the company’s revenue, not its profit. And that’s another issue: In 2025, SpaceX recorded an operating loss of $2.6 billion.

For comparison, ExxonMobil has a price-to-revenue ratio of 2, and last year it reported operating income of $41 billion. Google/Alphabet has a price-to-revenue ratio of 11 and, in 2025, recorded an operating profit of $129 billion. The key difference in those comparisons, of course, is that Elon Musk doesn’t work at Exxon or Google. He works at SpaceX, and for many investors and analysts, the Musk factor alone justifies the stratospheric valuation.

But while reporters, podcasters, and equity analysts are gleefully adding to the intergalactic exuberance, and projecting when Musk might move significant amounts of AI capacity into space and build a “base on the Moon and cities on other planets,” very few people are focusing on the fuel that powers SpaceX.

Let’s drill into SpaceX’s business and its S-1, and while doing so, perhaps bring a tad of the hype back down to earth.