SpaceX is now trading north of $450B in the secondary market. That's bigger than Lockheed, Boeing, and Northrop combined. But the real story this week isn't SpaceX. It's what the IPO filing quietly says about the rest of the space economy.
The S-1 hints at three things almost nobody is talking about. First, Starlink ARPU has quietly doubled since 2023, which means the constellation isn't just a hardware bet anymore. It's a recurring-revenue machine that looks more like AT&T than Lockheed. Second, the launch business has effectively become a captive supplier to Starlink, which makes the Falcon margin profile borderline meaningless as an external benchmark.
Investors are pricing SpaceX as a launch company. The filing reads like a telecom.
— Sean, on the IPO read
Third, and this is the one investors are missing: the Starship economics in the filing are footnoted as internal use. Which means the public math is going to look fundamentally different from anything Wall Street can model right now. We've been digging into what that footnote actually implies for the comp set, and the short version is that every other launch company is about to get repriced by association the moment the S-1 prices.