On June 12, SpaceX opened its first day of public trading at $150 a share, climbed as high as $176.52, and closed at $161.11 — a 19% gain on the IPO price of $135, pushing the company’s market value above $2 trillion and cementing Musk’s status as the world’s first trillionaire. The superlatives cascaded through the financial press. Largest IPO in history. Sixth-largest publicly traded company in the United States. A “reflection of the demand, interest, and desire to invest in these types of companies,” as one analyst put it. From a certain angle, the numbers are simply staggering. From a European angle, they are something else entirely.
The IPO, which raised $75 billion under the ticker SPCX on the Nasdaq, was built on a story that stretched far beyond rockets. The public filing revealed that SpaceX is now asking investors to underwrite not just launches and satellites, but AI product and platform risks, privacy exposure, and litigation hazards — a combined entity that now includes Starlink broadband, Grok AI products, and the social platform X indirectly through its xAI subsidiary. SpaceX acquired xAI, Musk’s artificial intelligence venture, in February 2026 in an all-stock deal that valued the combined entity at $1.25 trillion; the merger fundamentally changed the IPO narrative, adding an AI infrastructure angle alongside the launch and satellite business. The result is a single listed entity that spans rockets, satellite internet, generative AI, and a social media platform with hundreds of millions of users — all under the control of one man whose 80th birthday party, held at the White House just two days before the summit in Évian opened, featured a UFC championship event.
That detail is not decoration. It is the point.
Under the dual-class share structure disclosed in the prospectus, Musk holds approximately 42% of SpaceX’s equity but controls roughly 79% of its votes through super-voting shares that carry disproportionately higher rights. Ordinary shares sold to public investors carry standard voting rights, meaning buyers gain an economic stake but no meaningful ability to influence the company’s direction. The company has reincorporated from Delaware to Texas and qualifies as a “controlled company,” exempting it from most governance requirements, including the need for a majority of independent directors. Its articles of association require shareholders to “irrevocably and unconditionally” waive the right to a jury trial, prohibit class action lawsuits, and mandate arbitration for all disputes. SpaceX’s own prospectus acknowledges: “You will not have the same protections afforded to shareholders of companies that are subject to all corporate governance requirements.”
Denmark’s AkademikerPension pension fund has already blacklisted SpaceX, citing its “catastrophic governance structure.” The phrase, by the careful standards of institutional investment communication, is remarkable. It is also accurate. What the IPO has done is formalise something that was already structurally true: one man holds effective, unchecked authority over the most consequential private aerospace and satellite company in the world — and has now invited the public to finance that authority without sharing it.
For Europeans, the governance concern is not abstract. In early 2025, US negotiators allegedly threatened to limit Ukraine’s access to Starlink if Kyiv did not accept a critical minerals deal. In 2022, Musk reportedly declined to enable Starlink coverage near Russian-occupied Crimea to support a Ukrainian naval drone operation, citing his own assessment of escalation risk. Decisions made inside a private company, by engineers applying commercial access policies, altered the tactical balance in an active war. No treaty authorised it. No parliament voted on it. The governing logic was a firm’s terms of service.
Germany’s top antitrust official Andreas Mundt has described it as “insupportable” that one man could wield state-like powers through his satellite constellation. Angela Merkel has called the pairing of Musk and Trump “hugely concerning,” pointing specifically to Musk’s dominance in the space industry. These are not the observations of politicians looking for a fight. They are a description of a structural reality that the IPO has, if anything, made more durable: Starlink is now a publicly traded asset, but Musk’s control over it is more legally entrenched than ever.
The European Commission has moved to pre-empt the worst of this. A recent decision is set to favour European satellite operators over direct-to-device expansion by the likes of SpaceX and Amazon — partly because direct-to-device connectivity would allow foreign platforms to make terrestrial European mobile infrastructure effectively obsolete, but also as a precursor to the Commission’s Tech Sovereignty Package, explicitly designed to reduce strategic dependence on foreign technology providers. At the Mobile World Congress in March, the US Federal Communications Commission chairman warned Brussels against precisely this kind of preferential treatment. Washington, in other words, has decided that protecting SpaceX’s market access in Europe is now a matter of American commercial interest, to be defended with diplomatic pressure. The IPO has not diminished that dynamic. It has sharpened it.
The European response, such as it is, has a name: IRIS². Coordinated by the SpaceRISE consortium, incorporating Eutelsat, SES and Hispasat, IRIS² is planned as a 290-satellite multi-orbit constellation with initial services targeted for 2029, designed explicitly to provide European governments and citizens with connectivity that does not depend on the commercial or political decisions of a foreign billionaire. Norway and Iceland joined the programme in March, with both countries contributing funds for 2026–2027, and the architecture is designed to serve not only EU members but eventually allied states across Europe and Africa.
The honest assessment, however, is that 2029 is three years away. Eutelsat’s own CEO has said IRIS² will need to compete on price and performance with Starlink to win customers — a reminder that sovereignty is not a product feature, and that European users who have already subscribed to Starlink will not switch for political reasons alone. SpaceX currently accounts for 87% of US orbital launches, has over 9 million Starlink subscribers globally, and European public spending on space amounts to approximately 0.07% of GDP against the United States’ 0.24%. The gap in capacity, in pace of development, and in launch infrastructure is not something that a single Brussels initiative can close by a given deadline.
Wall Street analysts, meanwhile, are divided on the valuation itself. CFRA Research’s Keith Snyder issued a sell rating immediately after the IPO, describing the growth assumptions needed to justify $2 trillion as “borderline comical.” The former Nasdaq chief Robert Greifeld, rather more bullishly, said SpaceX “represents a stock trading not on fundamentals” but on “the aspiration of what’s possible with human spirit going forward in time” — and predicted that OpenAI and Anthropic would follow SpaceX to the public markets before year’s end.
That framing — aspiration, human spirit, the audacity of the project — is the language in which the SpaceX story is most naturally told in the United States. In Europe, the same facts produce a different register. A man who holds 79% of the votes in the world’s largest satellite internet company, who has recently threatened European regulators on social media, who has previously intervened unilaterally in a war being fought on European soil, and who has now raised $75 billion from public markets while ensuring that none of it buys any meaningful accountability — that is not a story of aspiration. It is a story of power, and of what happens when power of that scale operates without the institutional constraints that European liberal democracy has spent seventy years designing.
European scholars have written that the continent’s “honeymoon with history” is over, and that it must now engage the United States as a strong actor with its own interests and its own agenda. The SpaceX IPO is a precise illustration of what that means in practice. The aspiration is real. The rockets work. The satellites are up. The dependency is already there, already military, already geopolitical. What the public listing changes is that it is now permanent — capitalised, legally insulated, and growing.
IRIS² is the right response. Three years may turn out to be too long to wait.
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