When SpaceX confidentially filed for what could become the largest initial public offering in history, the event was treated primarily as a financial story. It is also a strategic one. The company now sits at the center of U.S. launch infrastructure, satellite communications, and dual-use military capability.[1] Through Starlink, it has shaped battlefield connectivity in Ukraine; through National Security Space Launch contracts, it has become deeply embedded in U.S. military logistics and space architecture. The company is reportedly valued at roughly $1.5 trillion and could raise more than $80 billion in a Nasdaq debut under ticker “SPCX.”[2] The more important question, however, is not simply how much SpaceX is worth but what happens when strategically critical infrastructure becomes governed by increasingly concentrated private capital structures.

Using SpaceX as a window into the future of defense-industrial power, this essay argues that the core challenge facing the U.S. defense industrial base is not simply technological competition or even industrial concentration alone but the political economy of how strategic innovation is financed, governed, and consolidated. Over the past three decades, the U.S. defense sector has evolved into a system that rewards monopoly power, sustainment lock-in, and shareholder discipline more effectively than redundancy, manufacturing depth, or rapid adaptation. Prime contractors dominate key programs; smaller suppliers continue to disappear; procurement increasingly depends on proprietary data rights and sole-source relationships; and capital flows more readily toward scalable software and speculative growth than toward the slower work of manufacturing capacity, repair infrastructure, and supply-chain resilience.[3]

The implications extend beyond economics. Financing structures increasingly shape what technologies get built, which firms survive, how supply chains evolve, and ultimately what kinds of military power the United States can sustain. The Pentagon itself has effectively acknowledged this reality through the creation of the Office of Strategic Capital, whose central premise is that private capital markets now influence the national-security technology agenda and systematically underfund strategically important but slower-return industrial capabilities.[4]

This essay develops that argument in three steps: first, it shows how concentration weakened the legacy defense-industrial base; second, it uses drones as a case study to show how private finance underfunds industrial depth; and third, it argues that SpaceX represents a new platform-based version of strategic concentration.

Fragility Beyond Defense

Concentration refers to the degree to which defense procurement markets are dominated by a limited number of sellers, buyers, or both. A concentrated supply market exists when only a few firms possess the technical, financial, or manufacturing capacity to provide a given weapon system or defense good. A concentrated buying market exists when the government is the dominant or sole purchaser.[5] Together, these conditions shape the level of competition, the barriers to entry facing new firms, and the degree of market power held by both contractors and the state.

The logic of concentration is not unique to defense. In 2022, the United States experienced a nationwide infant-formula shortage after contamination concerns forced the closure of Abbott Nutrition’s Sturgis facility. The Federal Trade Commission later noted that more than half of routine infant formula in the United States is purchased through the Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) program, where single-supplier contracts often allow one firm to capture roughly 84 percent of a state’s market after winning the bid.[6] The crisis revealed how vulnerable ostensibly efficient systems become when redundancy disappears.

Defense suffers from a similar logic, albeit with much higher stakes. Sole-source procurement and supplier concentration may appear efficient in peacetime spreadsheets, but they create strategic fragility when disruption occurs. In defense markets, the consequences are not empty grocery shelves but delayed repairs, munitions shortages, and dependence on contractors the government cannot easily replace. Concentration becomes especially dangerous when procurement rules, financing incentives, and intellectual-property protections collectively optimise away redundancy in the name of efficiency.[7]

How the Defense Base Narrowed

The current structure of the U.S. defense industrial base emerged largely from the post-Cold War consolidation wave. Reduced defense spending, combined with explicit government encouragement for restructuring, pushed the industry toward mergers and concentration. The number of major aerospace and defense prime contractors fell from fifty-one in the 1990s to five today.

Simultaneously, acquisition reform expanded the definition and use of “commercial items” in Pentagon procurement. According to the Department of Defense’s 2022 competition report, commercial items accounted for 30–50 percent of procurement in the early 2000s and more than 88 percent of new awards after 2011. While these reforms accelerated procurement in some cases, they also deepened vendor lock-in when the government failed to acquire the technical data and intellectual-property rights necessary for long-term maintenance and competition.[8]

The supplier ecosystem beneath the primes also hollowed out. The Pentagon reported that the small-business supplier base declined by roughly 40 percent over the previous decade, while former Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks warned that another 15,000 suppliers could disappear over the following ten years if trends persisted. Headline competition statistics obscure the extent of this concentration. Although more than 90 percent of contract actions are technically “competed,” competition rates by dollar value for major weapons-system portfolios often fall between 15 and 40 percent. In practice, the government still depends on a remarkably narrow set of firms for its most strategically important programs.[9]

Major contractor	FY2022 DoD contract obligations	HQ
Lockheed Martin	$44.5bn	Bethesda, Maryland
RTX	$25.4bn	Arlington, Virginia
General Dynamics	$21.5bn	Reston, Virginia
Boeing	$14.2bn	Arlington, Virginia
Northrop Grumman	$12.8bn	Falls Church, Virginia

Table sources: CRS’s 2024 defense-industrial-base report states that these five firms collectively took about 30.3 % of FY2022 DoD contract obligations, and that 58 of 78 major weapon systems in the FY2024 budget involved at least one of the “Big Five” as a prime contractor.^[10]

Concentration and Procurement

The consolidation of the defense industrial base has not merely reduced competition; it has altered the incentive structure of procurement itself. The Pentagon’s own competition report explicitly warns that excessive concentration enables firms to charge higher prices, foreclose rivals, reduce innovation, and constrain supply-chain resilience. Today, 90 percent of missile production comes from just three suppliers, while consolidation in solid rocket motors has left only two domestic producers. In microelectronics, the Department of Defense warns that offshoring and Pacific Rim dependence have weakened domestic manufacturing capability and heightened vulnerability to supply shocks and geopolitical coercion.[11]

The most visible manifestation of this dynamic is the TransDigm Group case. In 2019, the Department of Defense Inspector General found that the Pentagon paid approximately $16.1 million in excess profit on selected sole-source parts purchased from the company. A second audit in 2021 identified at least $20.8 million in excess profit across additional contracts and warned that the Pentagon lacked sufficient authority to obtain the cost data necessary to evaluate pricing below certain statutory thresholds.[12]

These were not isolated accounting anomalies. They reflected a broader procurement environment in which firms exploit certification barriers, sole-source dependency, and proprietary sustainment arrangements to extract monopoly rents from the state. Sustainment refers to the long-term maintenance, repair, spare parts, software updates, technical support, and logistical infrastructure required to keep a weapon system operational after it has been purchased. The Pentagon’s frustration with TransDigm was ultimately an acknowledgment that concentration had weakened the government’s bargaining power inside strategically critical supply chains.

The sustainment crisis surrounding the Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning II demonstrates how this dynamic scales across entire weapons programs. The Government Accountability Office estimated in 2023 that the F-35’s total life-cycle cost exceeded $1.7 trillion, including approximately $1.3 trillion tied to operations and sustainment. A subsequent GAO report found that projected sustainment costs had risen from $1.1 trillion in 2018 to roughly $1.58 trillion by 2023, even as aircraft availability declined.[13]

The underlying problem is not merely technical complexity; It is governance. The Pentagon often enters major procurement programs without securing sufficient technical data rights, limiting its ability to conduct independent repair, introduce second-source suppliers, or create meaningful lifecycle competition. As a result, sustainment becomes less a maintenance function than a long-term dependency relationship between the state and incumbent contractors.[14]

Concentration and Strategic Rigidity

Industrial concentration also reshapes the political environment surrounding defense policy. The Congressional Research Service describes the defense sector as part of an “iron triangle” linking contractors, Congress, and the Department of Defense. GAO found that fourteen major contractors employed roughly 1,700 former senior government and acquisition officials in 2019 alone.[15] This does not mean contractors dictate grand strategy outright. It does mean that retiring legacy systems, reducing geographically distributed programs, or shifting procurement away from incumbent suppliers becomes institutionally difficult. Dense coalitions of contractors, lobbyists, congressional districts, and former officials collectively reinforce existing procurement patterns even when technological realities shift.

Jacques S. Gansler, United States Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition and Sustainment and author of Democracy’s Arsenal: Creating a Twenty-First-Century Defense Industry, saw this coming in 2011. He said there is “enormous resistance” to full competition, partly because procurement managers avoid small upfront second-source costs, and partly because the current producer applies “enormous political pressure,” including through Congress, to avoid competitors. He was an ardent believer that defense is a state-structured market with one dominant buyer and a small group of major suppliers. That makes the financing and governance of defense innovation a public policy question, not merely a corporate strategy question.

In a CSIS report titled “Rebuilding the Arsenal of Democracy,” the authors argue that the United States is not industrially prepared for a prolonged great-power conflict, especially with China.[16] The report’s central warning is that the U.S. defense industrial base remains on a peacetime footing, while China is increasingly moving toward a wartime production posture. Unless the United States expands industrial capacity, accelerates production, reforms bureaucratic bottlenecks, and works more effectively with allies, its ability to deter future conflict could weaken.

The report also notes that China is producing military capabilities in larger quantities and with increasing sophistication across land, sea, air, space, missile, and other domains. It highlights that China’s 2024 defense budget increased by 7.2 percent, and some U.S. government estimates suggest that China is acquiring high-end weapons systems and equipment five to six times faster than the United States.[17]

While China has not surpassed the United States in every military category, the broader U.S. defense industrial base is under significant strain. Key challenges include slow contracting, fragile supply chains, limited surge capacity, expensive legacy systems, and a procurement system that still favors incumbent primes over scalable manufacturing ecosystems and resilient supply chains.

Drones and the Politics of Finance

If the preceding sections show how concentration makes the defense system expensive and politically rigid, drones show why that rigidity is strategically dangerous. They are the clearest example of a technology where battlefield relevance, commercial innovation, and manufacturing scale now overlap. Unlike aircraft carriers, fighter jets, or nuclear submarines, drones do not rely only on a closed defense-prime ecosystem. They depend on batteries, sensors, motors, software, communications systems, and commercial manufacturing networks that evolve faster than traditional procurement cycles. That makes them a useful test case for the argument that United States does not simply need more innovation; it needs financing structures capable of turning innovation into resilient production capacity. In drones, the gap between invention and industrial depth is already visible.

The 2025 Center for Security and Emerging Technology (CSET) report on the U.S. aerial-drone market captures this contradiction. It reveals a bifurcated ecosystem: broad entrepreneurial activity at the small-commercial level but remarkably thin industrial depth for larger military-grade systems. CSET identified 222 UAV developers marketing 593 platforms in the United States, yet only 33 of those platforms fell into the Pentagon’s more advanced Group 4 and Group 5 categories.[18] Among firms matched to financial data, only six and eight companies respectively developed systems in those upper categories.[19]

The problem is not a lack of American ingenuity. It is that the prevailing capital structure rewards certain kinds of innovation while neglecting others. Venture capital is well suited to software-heavy, commercially scalable technologies: autonomy stacks, artificial intelligence tools, sensing platforms, and dual-use applications that can grow quickly across civilian and military markets.[20] It is far less naturally suited to financing the slower and less glamorous foundations of military power: batteries, motors, secure communications hardware, tooling, assembly lines, component redundancy, depot capacity, and surge manufacturing. These are not always attractive venture investments because they require patient capital, regulatory navigation, physical infrastructure, longer repayment timelines, and uncertain government demand signals.[21] Yet they are precisely the capabilities that determine whether a promising prototype can become a battlefield-relevant system at scale.

The CSET report illustrates this imbalance clearly. It found that more than 62 percent of U.S. drone firms in its sample were privately held and that investment activity was concentrated overwhelmingly among smaller UAV developers rather than firms producing larger, certification-heavy military systems.[22] That pattern is not surprising. Smaller drones are cheaper to prototype, easier to commercialize, and more attractive to investors looking for faster growth. Larger military-grade systems, by contrast, require extensive testing, security requirements, specialized manufacturing, government contracting expertise, and longer development timelines. The result is a drone ecosystem that looks dynamic on the surface but remains uneven underneath: rich in entrepreneurial experimentation, but comparatively thin in the industrial capacity needed for sustained military production.

This is why the Pentagon’s Office of Strategic Capital matters. Its creation is an implicit admission that procurement alone cannot solve the financing problem. Buying finished systems after they emerge does little to build the upstream industrial base required to produce them reliably. The Office of Strategic Capital’s 2024 investment strategy explicitly recognizes that private capital shapes the U.S. research-and-development agenda, but that strategically critical technologies often fail to attract sufficient investment because their timelines are too long, their repayment prospects too distant, and their technical risks too high for conventional investors.[23] In other words, the market may fund the visible edge of innovation while underfunding the hidden infrastructure that makes innovation militarily useful.

The drone market also exposes the geopolitical dimension of this financing failure. Chinese drone manufacturer Da-Jiang Innovations (DJI) reportedly controls roughly 90 percent of the global commercial small-UAV market, giving China a powerful position in the very class of low-cost systems that recent conflicts have made militarily significant.[24] But the deeper vulnerability is not just DJI’s market share. It is the component ecosystem beneath the airframe. Drones depend on batteries, motors, sensors, semiconductors, software, communications links, and precision manufacturing networks. CSET highlights bottlenecks in exactly these areas and notes how Chinese sanctions in 2024 forced U.S. drone firm Skydio to ration batteries. That episode is a warning: even a leading American drone company can become constrained if key components remain tied to vulnerable foreign supply chains.[25]

The strategic implication is stark. The United States can have world-class autonomy software, advanced defense startups, and a vibrant venture ecosystem while still lacking the manufacturing depth needed to scale production in a crisis. In a short conflict, superior platforms may matter most. In a prolonged contest, replacement rates, component access, repair capacity, and production speed become decisive. This is where the current innovation model falls short. It celebrates and obsesses over technological breakthroughs but often neglects the industrial systems that allow those breakthroughs to survive contact with wartime demand.

This is the central strategic failure of the current model: innovation without industrial finance produces technological brilliance without manufacturing resilience. A defense innovation system that can generate prototypes but cannot finance batteries, tooling, second sources, and surge capacity is not truly prepared for great-power competition. The question, then, is not whether the United States can invent the next generation of military technology. It is whether its financing institutions can build the industrial base required to produce, maintain, and replace that technology at scale.

Why the SpaceX IPO Matters

The proposed SpaceX IPO sharpens the central argument of this essay because it ties together the capital markets, industrial policy, and national security into a single institutional event. The expected valuation of SpaceX above $1.5 trillion at an $80 billion capital raise would make it the largest initial public offering in history. This is not simply a story about investor appetite for space technology. It is a test case for what happens when strategically critical infrastructure becomes financed, valued, and governed through public equity markets.

SpaceX is not a normal commercial firm entering public markets. It is a central actor in U.S. launch capacity, satellite connectivity, and military space architecture. In April 2025, Space Systems Command awarded National Security Space Launch Phase 3 Lane 2 contracts to SpaceX, United Launch Alliance, and Blue Origin, with SpaceX receiving the largest expected share of the most demanding missions.[26] That matters because the company’s value is not derived only from consumer demand, commercial satellite broadband, or future Mars ambitions. It is also built on its role as a quasi-strategic platform whose services are increasingly woven into U.S. national-security operations.[27] In that sense, SpaceX represents a new version of defense-industrial concentration: not the old prime contractor model of cost-plus legacy platforms, but a privately governed, venture-backed infrastructure firm that becomes indispensable before public institutions fully understand how to regulate its strategic leverage.

The governance structure therefore deserves scrutiny even before the valuation does. Reporting indicates that SpaceX’s offering would preserve strong insider control through a dual-class share structure, with Class B shares carrying ten votes per share while public investors receive lower-vote Class A shares.[28] That structure may reassure founder-led strategic continuity, but it also limits the ability of ordinary shareholders to discipline management. When applied to a company whose infrastructure supports military launch, battlefield communications, satellite internet, and potentially future space-based data infrastructure, concentrated voting control becomes more than a corporate-governance issue. It becomes a question of democratic accountability over privately controlled strategic capacity.

The planned retail allocation adds another layer of risk. Business Insider reports that retail investors would be able to buy into the IPO through platforms including Charles Schwab, Fidelity, Robinhood, SoFi, and E-Trade, while also noting that SpaceX warned in its filing that strong retail interest could contribute to stock-price volatility.[29] This matters because a large retail allocation can transform a strategic infrastructure firm into a mass speculative asset. If the company’s valuation becomes tied to retail enthusiasm, index inclusion, and market momentum, its strategic narrative may become increasingly shaped by the need to sustain investor confidence. That does not mean public markets will necessarily distort SpaceX’s national-security role, but it does mean that strategic infrastructure would now be exposed to the pressures of quarterly expectations, valuation defense, and speculative growth storytelling.

The company’s financials also complicate the story. SpaceX generated roughly $18.7 billion in revenue in 2025, but recorded significant losses, including a $4.9 billion net loss and a $2.6 billion operating loss.[30] In the first quarter of 2026, the losses continued: SpaceX posted a net loss of roughly $4.3 billion on revenue of about $4.7 billion.[31] Starlink was the company’s strongest revenue contributor, with $11.4 billion in 2025 revenue, while the company’s broader future growth story remains tied to capital-intensive projects such as Starship, lunar and Martian infrastructure, space-based data centers, and AI-related expansion.[32] This is precisely where the financing question becomes strategic. SpaceX’s long-term value depends on investments with enormous upfront capital needs, uncertain timelines, and public-sector relevance. Those are the same characteristics that make defense innovation difficult to finance well through ordinary market mechanisms.

The SpaceX case therefore connects directly to the broader problem of the defense industrial base. As contended, legacy concentration creates price gouging, sustainment lock-in, lobbying power, and institutional rigidity. SpaceX shows that the next generation of concentration may look different. It may not emerge through post-Cold War mergers among traditional primes, but through the scaling of private platforms that accumulate strategic indispensability through commercial markets, government contracts, and capital-market enthusiasm at the same time. The result is not simply monopoly in the old sense; it is infrastructural dependence. The state may not own the platform, but it increasingly relies on it.

This is why the SpaceX IPO should raise eyebrows in Washington. The issue is not whether SpaceX is innovative; it clearly is. The issue is whether American institutions have developed the governance tools required for a world in which private firms finance, own, and operate infrastructure central to military power. If the United States is worried about concentration among traditional primes, it should also be attentive to concentration in emerging strategic platforms. Public markets may provide the capital needed for the next industrial revolution, but they may also amplify volatility, preserve insider control, and expose national-security infrastructure to speculative pressures. The question is also not whether SpaceX should go public. The deeper question is whether the American state can govern the strategic consequences of private capital when private capital increasingly builds the architecture of national power.

Conclusion

Ultimately, the SpaceX IPO should be understood not as a departure from the defense-industrial problem, but as its next evolution that we are underprepared for. The old model of concentration produced dependence on a small number of incumbent primes, locking the state into expensive sustainment systems, fragile supply chains, and politically protected programs. The new model may be even more complex where strategically essential platforms emerge from private capital markets, scale through commercial demand, become indispensable to national security, and then enter public markets under governance structures that preserve concentrated insider control.

This does not mean that firms like SpaceX should be treated simply as threats. Their innovation, speed, and willingness to challenge legacy procurement models are precisely what the U.S. defense base has often lacked, but innovation alone is not strategy. If the United States wants to rebuild a military arsenal for the twenty-first century, it must move beyond celebrating technological disruption and confront the harder political economy questions: who finances strategic capacity, who governs it, and who benefits from it? The U.S. must also consider whether and how the state can ensure redundancy, resilience, and democratic accountability when the infrastructure of national power is increasingly built by private firms.

 

 

 

[1] Reuters, “SpaceX registers to take rocket maker public in blockbuster IPO, Bloomberg News reports,” April 1, 2026, https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/spacex-registers-take-rocket-maker-public-blockbuster-ipo-bloomberg-news-reports-2026-04-01/.

[2] TradingView News, “SPCX: SpaceX Finally Reveals Financials Ahead of Huge IPO — They Ain’t That Good,” TradingView, accessed May 25, 2026, https://www.tradingview.com/news/tradingview:adaff05e2094b:0-spcx-spacex-finally-reveals-financials-ahead-of-huge-ipo-they-ain-t-that-good/

[3] U.S. Department of Defense, Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition and Sustainment, State of Competition within the Defense Industrial Base (Washington, DC: Department of Defense, February 2022), https://media.defense.gov/2022/Feb/15/2002939087/-1/-1/1/STATE-OF-COMPETITION-WITHIN-THE-DEFENSE-INDUSTRIAL-BASE.PDF

[4] U.S. Department of Defense, Office of Strategic Capital, FY2024 Investment Strategy for the Office of Strategic Capital(Washington, DC: Department of Defense, March 2024), https://www.cto.mil/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/FY24_Invest_Strat_OSC.pdf

[5] James W. McKie, Concentration in Military Procurement Markets: A Classification and Analysis of Contract Data. Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 1970. https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_memoranda/RM6307.html.

[6] Federal Trade Commission, Market Factors Relevant to Infant Formula Supply Disruptions (2022) (Washington, DC: Federal Trade Commission, March 13, 2024), https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/ftc_gov/pdf/infant_formula_report_final.pdf.

[7] U.S. Department of Defense, State of Competition within the Defense Industrial Base.

[8] Ibid.

[9] Ibid.

^[10] Congressional Research Service, The U.S. Defense Industrial Base: Background and Issues for Congress, R47751 (Washington, DC: Congressional Research Service, September 23, 2024), https://www.everycrsreport.com/reports/R47751.html

[11]  U.S. Department of Defense, State of Competition within the Defense Industrial Base.

[12] U.S. Department of Defense, Office of Inspector General, Review of Parts Purchased from TransDigm Group, Inc., DODIG-2019-060 (Alexandria, VA: Department of Defense, February 25, 2019), https://www.dodig.mil/reports.html/Article/1769041/review-of-parts-purchased-from-transdigm-group-inc-dodig-2019-060/

[13] U.S. Government Accountability Office, F-35 Aircraft: DOD and the Military Services Need to Reassess the Future Sustainment Strategy, GAO-23-105341 (Washington, DC: Government Accountability Office, September 21, 2023), https://www.gao.gov/assets/gao-23-105341.pdf.

[14] CRS, U.S. Defense Industrial Base.

[15] U.S. Government Accountability Office, F-35 Aircraft: DOD and the Military Services Need to Reassess the Future Sustainment Strategy

[16] Seth G. Jones and Alexander Palmer, Rebuilding the Arsenal of Democracy: The U.S. and Chinese Defense Industrial Bases in an Era of Great Power Competition (Washington, DC: Center for Strategic and International Studies, March 2024), https://csis-website-prod.s3.amazonaws.com/s3fs-public/2024-03/240306_Jones_Rebuilding_Democracy_0.pdf?VersionId=KkuViuhUaxBPHB0nc_FtQ.qufXNOgxUj

[17] Ibid.

[18] DoD UAS group classifications divide unmanned aerial systems into five categories based primarily on weight, operating altitude, and speed. Groups 1 to 3 generally cover smaller systems, while Groups 4 and 5 cover larger platforms above 1,320 pounds. Group 4 systems usually operate below 18,000 feet, whereas Group 5 systems typically operate above that threshold. In this context, the upper categories matter because they represent more complex, capital-intensive, and militarily capable drones.

[19] Kyle Miller et al., The U.S. Aerial Drone Market (Washington, DC: Center for Security and Emerging Technology, November 2025), https://cset.georgetown.edu/publication/the-u-s-aerial-drone-market/

[20] Ibid.

[21] Ibid.

[22] Ibid.

[23] U.S. Department of Defense, Office of Strategic Capital, FY2024 Investment Strategy

[24] Ana Maria Constantin, “The US Has Banned the World’s Best Drones. It Has Not Figured Out How to Make Them,” The Next Web, May 3, 2026, https://thenextweb.com/news/us-drone-dji-ban-supply-chain

[25] Miller et al., The U.S. Aerial Drone Market

[26] Secretary of the Air Force Public Affairs, “Space Systems Command Awards National Security Space Launch Phase 3 Lane 2 Contracts,” United States Space Force, April 4, 2025, https://www.spaceforce.mil/News/Article-Display/Article/4146459/space-systems-command-awards-national-security-space-launch-phase-3-lane-2-cont/

[27] Jeremy Phillips, “One-Fifth of SpaceX Revenue Comes From Uncle Sam: The Defense Contractors That Should Worry,” 24/7 Wall St., May 21, 2026, https://247wallst.com/investing/2026/05/21/one-fifth-of-spacex-revenue-comes-from-uncle-sam-the-defense-contractors-that-should-worry/

[28] Huileng Tan, “SpaceX Details How Retail Investors Can Buy Into Its IPO,” Business Insider, May 21, 2026, https://www.businessinsider.com/how-to-buy-spacex-ipo-retail-investors-schwab-fidelity-robinhood-2026-5

[29] Ibid.

[30] Faiz Siddiqui, “Musk’s SpaceX Discloses Massive Losses Ahead of Expected IPO,” Washington Post, May 20, 2026, https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2026/05/20/elon-musk-spacex-initial-public-offering-filing-reveals-massive-losses/

[31] Matthew Fox, “SpaceX Is a ‘Money Furnace,’ Former Hedge Fund Manager Says,” Yahoo Finance, May 22, 2026, https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/stocks/articles/spacex-money-furnace-former-hedge-113054242.html.

[32] Nick Robins-Early, “SpaceX Reveals Plan for $1.75tn Stock Market Debut That Could Make Musk a Trillionaire,” The Guardian, May 20, 2026, https://www.theguardian.com/science/2026/may/20/spacex-finances-stock-market-debut