SpaceX IPO Could Create More Wealth Than All IPOs in the Last 20 Years Combined. Here’s Why Early Investors Are Banking On It

© Pascal Le Segretain / Getty Images On a recent Earn Your Leisure segment, co-host Rashaad Bilal quoted investor Barry Atlas with a claim that stops you mid-scroll: “these companies are going to make more money than all of the IPOs in the last 20 years put together,” creating “a whole new class of billionaires” from just a handful of listings. SpaceX is the marquee name driving that thesis. I have been studying the SpaceX cap table and reading every leaked secondary tender for the better part of three years now, and the May 2026 S-1 finally puts numbers behind the hype. Here is what the filing says, why early private investors are dancing, and what public-market buyers should realistically expect. What SpaceX’s S-1 Actually Discloses SpaceX organizes the business into three segments: Space, Connectivity, and AI. In 2025, consolidated revenue was $18,674 million with Adjusted EBITDA of $6,584 million. The Connectivity segment, which is essentially Starlink, did $11,387 million in revenue and $7,168 million in Segment Adjusted EBITDA, growing 50% year over year. Starlink ended Q1 2026 with 10.3 million subscribers at $66 monthly ARPU, more than double the prior-year subscriber count. The Space segment ran 170 launches and 2,213 metric tons to orbit in 2025. The newly acquired AI segment is burning cash on purpose: $7,723 million in Q1 2026 capex alone, per the S-1 filed with the SEC. That is the business the public will be asked to buy. Bilal’s co-host added the part that matters most: “we actually know people that are in some of these rounds, which is different from any time I could think of.” The Network Access Story: 2 Chainz and Angela Yee The hosts pointed to 2 Chainz and Angela Yee as early SpaceX investors, and noted that many people in their network bought into these private companies five or six years ago. Yee was held up as a model of relationship-driven private investing, going back to early Detroit real estate. The structural insight is that wealth created in this IPO will be recycled into Series A and B rounds. For some investors, the private side matters more than the IPO itself. What Compounded Wealth Looks Like in Public Markets The hosts cited NVIDIA buyers from 2016 and 2017 as the reference point. NVIDIA (NASDAQ:NVDA | NVDA Price Prediction) is up 18,311% over the past ten years, with a current market cap of $5.11 trillion. Q1 FY27 revenue hit $81.61 billion, up 85.2% year over year, and Jensen Huang described the AI buildout as “the largest infrastructure expansion in human history.” Details are in NVIDIA’s Q1 FY27 filing. AMD’s Decade Run Advanced Micro Devices (NASDAQ:AMD) has returned 11,193% over the past ten years and trades at a forward P/E of 74 with an $841 billion market cap. Q1 2026 revenue was $10.25 billion, up 37.9% year over year, with Data Center revenue up 57%. Rocket Lab: The Closest Public Pure-Play Rocket Lab (NASDAQ:RKLB) is the cleanest public analog to SpaceX’s launch and space-systems story. The stock is up 424% over the past year and 832% since its September 2021 SPAC debut. Q1 2026 revenue hit $200.35 million, up 63.5% year over year, with backlog of $2.2 billion and Neutron’s debut targeted later in 2026. RKLB trades at 122x sales with analyst consensus target at $103.91 versus the current $143.48 price. The valuation gap implies much SpaceX-comp enthusiasm is already in the stock. The Honest Wrap-Up If Atlas is directionally right, the SpaceX listing will mint a new class of billionaires. The catch is in the timing of when you arrived. Early investors who wrote checks five or six years ago at single-digit-billion valuations are looking at returns that NVIDIA and AMD long-term holders would recognize. Public investors who tap the IPO button on day one are buying a mature, capital-hungry conglomerate at what the S-1 implies will be a generational price tag. The Bilal framing is the right one. Wealth gets created in the rounds before the ticker exists. Your job, whether you can access private rounds or not, is to size expectations to where on the curve you are actually buying.