More than 20 years after founding SpaceX, the record-breaking company that transformed the global space industry, Elon Musk is planning to take the enterprise public.

Here is a look at what is expected to be the largest IPO in history.

What’s at stake?

SpaceX is owned by Elon Musk alongside several investment funds. Tech giant Alphabet, Google’s parent company, is also among the space company’s shareholders.

A public listing would open SpaceX to a broader and more diverse pool of investors, including individual buyers, while giving existing shareholders an easier path to cash out and realize substantial capital gains.

“This is a capital intensive business,” Matthew Kennedy of Renaissance Capital investment management firm told AFP.

“SpaceX has never had any difficulty raising funds in the private market, but public markets are undoubtedly larger. Liquidity is important as well, it can help with making acquisitions.”

According to Bloomberg and the financial data platform PitchBook, the IPO could raise more than $30 billion, an unprecedented sum for a deal of this kind and far more than the $10 billion the company has raised since its inception.

This would bring its total valuation to $1.5 trillion.

Why so much money?

The IPO comes amid a boom in the space industry. Worth $630 billion in 2023, the sector is expected to triple in size by 2035, according to the consulting firm McKinsey and the World Economic Forum.

And SpaceX, which dominates the space launch market with its reusable rockets and owns the largest satellite constellation through Starlink, has a unique appeal.

It’s “kind of a black swan event and unique so that we can’t draw too many parallels across the whole space economy,” Clayton Swope of the Center for Strategic and International Studies told AFP.