SpaceX is reportedly valued at around $800 billion ahead of slated 2026 IPO, sending Musk’s net worth soaring

Recently there’s been a hell of a lot of noise around Elon Musk’s rocket ship and satellite internet company, SpaceX, so much so that employees received an internal email informing them that the business is entering a “regulatory quiet period,” per Bloomberg reporting this morning.

SpaceX was founded in 2002 and has notched impressive firsts in the decades since, including being the first private company to send humans to the International Space Station five years ago. Now, workers are being asked to refrain from talking publicly about plans for a potential blockbuster IPO next year, the company’s growth, and its valuation.

Thanks to a mid-December insider tender offering, we have a good idea of just how much the latter has jumped in recent years.

Back in July of this year, the company was reportedly selling shares and raising money at a $400 billion valuation, a figure that’s doubled in the months since. In that period, SpaceX has continued its domination across the industry with more affordable space launches and exploration ambitions — per Forbes, the company “now launches more payload into orbit than the rest of the world combined.”

All of this is, obviously, pretty huge for Elon Musk, the SpaceX founder, CEO, and richest person on Earth, who also saw one of his other companies, Tesla, close at a record high yesterday for the first time in almost exactly a year. Indeed, his 42% stake in the $800 billion SpaceX business means that the majority of his reported $648 billion net worth — on paper, as we first noted in February — comes from what had once been a bit of a side hustle alongside his booming EV business.