Gulf’s SpaceX gamble is about to deliver in stratospheric fashion

Only after I tried to read the 277-page SpaceX IPO filing did I grasp the truth of Winston Churchill’s observation that his sceptred isle and America were two countries separated by a common language.

For my Brit friends and editors, SpaceX is a rocket launch, satellite and AI business. In the legal gobbledygook of SEC/Wall Street, American lingo, SpaceX is history’s first “orbital infrastructure conglomerate”.

A rose by any other name would smell just as sweet – especially when that rose is a 22-year-old venture founded by the world’s first near-trillionaire.

Its IPO, scheduled for Friday, June 12, is expected to raise a staggering $75 billion in equity capital, more than double the $29 billion generated by the 2019 Saudi Aramco flotation.

SpaceX was valued at just $45 billion as recently as late 2020, when several GCC sovereign wealth funds and family offices were prescient enough to acquire stakes through the private-market liquidity events Elon Musk opened to longtime executives and engineers.

Now, six years later, SpaceX’s IPO valuation on the eve of its Nasdaq listing is $1.8 trillion, and it will probably pop above $2 trillion when it trades under the symbol SPCX.

The maths are staggering. The SpaceX IPO will generate a 50-times financial windfall for a constellation of GCC sovereign funds and family offices who embraced the awesome early potential of Elon Musk’s science fiction – and even surreal – vision of space travel, satellite internet and the first human colony on Mars.

SpaceX is literally like no other business on, ahem, Earth. The GCC is at the apex of a space economy that the IPO filing identifies as a $28.5 trillion total addressable market.

I expect SpaceX will have a seismic impact on GCC finance, rocket launch technology, robotics, maritime/aviation communications and even national security in an age of drone warfare. Starlink – now part of SpaceX – is available on Emirates airline flights. Emirati astronauts have flown on SpaceX Falcon 9 rockets to the International Space Station.

The most prominent GCC-linked investor on the SpaceX cap table is Saudi Arabia’s Humain, whose $5 billion investment in xAI has reportedly been converted into SpaceX shares ahead of the IPO.

The Wall Street grapevine also suggests that Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF) is in talks to act as a further $5 billion anchor investor in what could become the flotation of a lifetime.

Among the best-known Gulf corporate and family office investors already exposed to SpaceX are Kingdom Holding and the private office of Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Al Saud.

However, there are dozens of other GCC corporates that have hit paydirt in the SpaceX El Dorado, including a tiny $5 million investment syndicate arranged by yours truly that is now worth almost $250 million at the IPO valuations.

Sometimes it is better to have the neurological wiring of a hopeless romantic than the soul of a certified public accountant. This is especially true for those of us whose boyhood nirvana was to watch the Apollo 11 moonwalk on a grainy black and white TV screen a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.

Sovereign wealth funds from Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Oman, Qatar, Bahrain and Kuwait are all believed to be pre-IPO investors in SpaceX. They too will have their rendezvous with Nasdaq destiny next week, when lead underwriter Goldman Sachs prices the jumbo flotation alongside 18 of the world’s most powerful investment banking franchises.

Listing day will mark not only the culmination of the largest IPO in modern financial history, but also the apotheosis of Wall Street’s ultimate Masters of the Universe.

OpenAI quietly raised $100 billion in its last private market round. So I am certain that the SpaceX IPO will be oversubscribed amid a global investor feeding frenzy. For instance, Jamie Dimon, the chairman of JPMorgan and the uncrowned king du jour of Wall Street, addressed 2,900 of the mega bank’s ultra-high-net-worth clients on the merits of the SpaceX IPO in a virtual briefing.

When Elon Musk joined him on the call, wild applause greeted Silicon Valley’s living legend. Will Dimon’s unprecedented move, to market the SpaceX IPO personally, trigger untold billions in new orders? Absolutely.

I feel privileged to witness history in the making on Nasdaq with the GCC’s crème de la crème at its epicentre. Space is still the final frontier for humankind.

Welcome to the world, SPCX.