The Offering

SpaceX filed for the largest IPO in stock market history. The valuation is $1.75 trillion. The ticker will be SPCX. Trading opens June 12. Elon Musk is retaining 85.1 percent of the vote.

(I am not making up the percentage. It is precise. The person who calculated it arrived at 85.1 and did not go back to round it to something rounder.)

An IPO is when a company raises money from the public by selling shares. In exchange, the public receives ownership and a proportional say in company decisions. This arrangement has functioned approximately this way since the Dutch invented it in 1602, which is a long time for one mechanism to remain mostly intact.

What happens here is slightly different. SpaceX will sell shares to the public. The public will receive shares. The shares will be tradeable on Nasdaq. Elon Musk will retain 85.1 percent of the vote. The public's combined stake in decisions will be the remaining 14.9 percent, which financial analysts have described, with apparent sincerity, as meaningful exposure to the mission. The mission is to colonize Mars.

You now have meaningful exposure to it.

For years, Musk kept SpaceX private because, he explained at length, public shareholders would pressure the company toward short-term returns rather than the long-term mission of becoming a multi-planetary species. He said this repeatedly and clearly. The IPO is priced at $1.75 trillion.

The previous largest IPO in history was Saudi Aramco, which raises money from the public in exchange for ownership of a company that finds and sells oil. SpaceX will raise money from the public in exchange for meaningful exposure to a company that builds rockets and, beginning June 12, sells meaningful exposure. Elon retains the rockets. You retain the exposure.

There is no word yet on what the public was preventing that required twenty-two years of exclusion from the process.

(The Dutch, for what it is worth, gave shareholders actual votes. This was considered innovative at the time. It still is.)