Elon Musk’s SpaceX is barreling toward what could be the largest IPO ever, and biographer Walter Isaacson says the company is chasing something bigger than rockets.

Speaking on CNBC, Isaacson argued that “space will be the new AI by 2027,” with a permanent base on the moon as the prize.

Isaacson framed the moon timeline around geopolitical pressure rather than commercial demand alone. He noted China is aiming for a lunar base by 2029 or 2030, a prospect he said “sure lit a fire” under Capitol Hill and NASA.

The filing itself is making the same bet, only with a number attached.

The $28.5 Trillion Pitch

SpaceX’s prospectus calls its opportunity the largest actionable total addressable market in human history, pegging the figure at $28.5 trillion.

The bulk of that, roughly $26.5 trillion, sits in AI rather than launch, with the company’s Starlink connectivity business and core space segment making up the rest.

The pitch, then, is to value SpaceX like an AI company rather than a rocket company, likely the only math that reaches a $1.5 trillion valuation. The catch is that the biggest slice of that market depends on data centers in orbit that do not yet exist.

However, some of the AI revenue is already arriving.

The filing discloses that Anthropic pays SpaceX $1.25 billion a month through 2029 for compute capacity, a staggering near-term cash flow that Isaacson flagged on air.

That capacity covers terrestrial data centers rather than the orbital facilities the panel speculated about, and either party can exit on 90 days notice.

What Prediction Markets Are Pricing

Polymarket traders are pricing the listing as close to a sure thing on timing, with an 84% chance the IPO lands before June 15.

They are almost as confident on scale, giving 65% odds that the closing market cap tops $2 trillion.

Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, has a 92% chance of becoming a trillionaire this year. Isaacson says the milestone is not about the money for Musk, who he claims wants to “hit a trillion as if he’s playing Elden Ring or Polytopia.”

The filing gives him a board to play on, mapping a compensation ladder that climbs from $1.065 trillion to $6.565 trillion in milestones.

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