The day after tomorrow SpaceX goes public. Within a few weeks it will sit in your index fund, not because you wanted it, but because the rules were quietly rewritten. And the valuation? It stands or falls on targets that are extremely ambitious even for Elon Musk.
On Friday 12 June 2026 SpaceX makes its stock market debut (IPO: the first day anyone can buy shares in a company). Ticker: SPCX. Offer price: $135 (about €117) per share. Valuation: €1.5 trillion, comparable to the GDP of Spain. Raised: €65 billion, more than any stock market listing ever. Euro amounts converted at €1 = $1.16.
The quiet rule change
In February 2026 a consultation document appeared on the website of Nasdaq, the American technology exchange. No press release, no fanfare. Anyone who read it saw something remarkable: from 1 May, newly listed companies that rank in the top 40 by market value can be included in the Nasdaq-100 after just fifteen trading days; the index of the hundred largest technology companies, the premier league of the exchange. Previously that took about three months. The requirement for a minimum free float, the part of the shares that is freely tradable and not locked up with the founders, was also dropped.
That sounds technical, but the consequences are enormous. An index is not only a ranking: there is money attached to it. Index funds and ETFs, investment funds that do not pick shares but simply buy the whole index. The default choice of millions of passive investors are obliged to buy every new component of the index. The companies in the Nasdaq-100 are together worth a rough €33 trillion, and €1.2 trillion in capital follows the Nasdaq exchange, and €600 billion the index funds and ETFs that are obliged to buy every new index member. So anyone who owns a Nasdaq tracker automatically becomes a SpaceX shareholder around 7 July.
This is no coincidence. News agency Reuters reported in March that SpaceX made fast index inclusion a condition in its choice between Nasdaq and rival New York Stock Exchange. Nasdaq adjusted its rules; SpaceX chose Nasdaq. In the financial world this is now whispered about as “Lex SpaceX”. A law made to measure for one company.
And it did not stop with one index provider. FTSE Russell dropped its float requirement. The maker of the MSCI World, MSCI. The world index behind virtually every “just invest globally” product in the Netherlands confirmed last Monday that SpaceX will enter its indices after only ten trading days. About €5 trillion of passively invested money is tied to MSCI indices. Only S&P, keeper of the leading American S&P 500 index, held firm: SpaceX does not meet the profit requirement (four consecutive quarters of profit) and will join in mid-2027 at the earliest.
So three of the four large index providers cleared the way. The result: an estimated €19 to €23 billion in forced purchases this summer. While the same funds have to sell Nvidia (NVDA), Apple (AAPL) and Microsoft (MSFT) pro rata to pay for that purchase. And that with a free float of only 5 to 7 percent: very few tradable shares against a wall of mandatory demand. Fuel for wild price swings.
The pitch: dreams at 94 times revenue
So what are you actually buying? SpaceX is valued at 94 times annual revenue (€1.5 trillion against €16.2 billion in revenue in 2025). For context: a healthy, mature company usually costs two to four times revenue on the exchange; even chip giant Nvidia, at the peak of the AI frenzy, did not get above half the current valuation at which SpaceX is going public. That price is only justifiable if three stories come true at the same time.
Story one: Starlink. The satellite internet of SpaceX, and the only part that already earns money: 10.3 million subscribers, 69 percent of revenue, €3.8 billion operating profit in 2025. Impressive, but analysts estimate that Starlink justifies only 40 to 55 percent of the valuation. The rest hangs on promises.
Story two: xAI. The acquisition of Musk’s AI company in February, including X (formerly Twitter) and chatbot Grok, turned a profitable space company into a loss-making conglomerate: €4.3 billion net loss over 2025, of which €4.4 billion in AI research costs. According to analysts, Grok ranks only fifth among the AI models and the entire founder team recently left. Research firm Morningstar speaks of a “material risk of value destruction”.
Story three: a million satellites. The crown jewel of the pitch. Musk wants to launch a million satellites that together act as data centres in space. Computing power for AI, but in orbit around the earth, fed by solar energy. The permit application is already with the American regulator. For that, his new mega rocket Starship has to launch every hour within three years.
The reality: Starship is still in the test phase. On the twelfth test flight the upper rocket stage landed successfully, but the lower one crashed into the Gulf of Mexico. And space expert Robert Zubrin calculates that power from such a satellite costs about €87,000 per kilowatt against €2,600 for solar panels on a roof. A cost gap of a factor of thirty that “existing technology”, as Musk calls it, does not close by itself.
Morningstar summed it up. Only in the most optimistic scenario, a reusable Starship and commercially successful space data centres, is the offer price defensible. Probability according to the analysts: 7 percent. Their calculated fair value: $63, less than half the $135 you pay. The difference is pure hope premium on the dreams of one man.
That same man has proved sceptics wrong before, with Tesla and the Falcon 9 rocket, but he also has a long history of missed deadlines: Mars in 2018, then 2022, still not there. The pattern: the goals are serious, the timelines structurally too optimistic. SpaceX writes it itself in the prospectus (the official information document for a stock market listing): “We have a history of net losses and may not become profitable.”
What does this mean for you?
MSCI World tracker? SpaceX will be in it around the end of June, even earlier than in the Nasdaq-100. A small weight, but without you having any say in it. The same goes for many modern pension schemes where your contribution is invested in such a global index fund.
Pension with ABP or PFZW? Not for now. The large funds deliberately stay on the sidelines. Musk holds 85 percent of the voting rights and cannot be dismissed. And they do not follow an off-the-shelf MSCI index, but their own composed baskets of shares with their own criteria. Still, we often see that once a company is in the big indices things move very fast, and over time it seeps towards pension money anyway.
Subscribe yourself? That is possible through brokers DeGiro or Trade Republic. Keep in mind: the offer is two times oversubscribed and 30 percent is reserved for retail investors, an unusually high share. When Tesla joined the S&P 500 at the end of 2020, the share rose 57 percent before inclusion and fell 7 percent on the first index day. Buy the rumour, sell the news.
Do nothing? Then you wait until SpaceX proves the promises are more than a listing story. But then you may be buying in at a higher valuation.
The real question stays unanswered: who protects the passive investor when index providers rewrite their rules for one prestigious client? OpenAI and Anthropic are already in line for 2026. The precedent has been set.
And if you do not believe the story: you do not have to. Your index fund simply buys it for you.