SpaceX set out its IPO pitch to retail investors early on Thursday with a video in which Chief Financial Officer Bret Johnsen joins the dots between the company’s rocket, satellite and AI businesses.
The 17-minute-long presentation is part of the Elon Musk-led company’s efforts to attract mom and pop investors from around the world. Those buyers are a key part of SpaceX’s strategy in the IPO, with as much as 30% of the $75 billion offering allocated to the group, Bloomberg News has reported.
The first and only person to appear on the video is Johnsen, who introduces himself as the only CFO the company has ever had. It is hosted on the company’s website spacexipo.com, which has a prominent tout encouraging visitors to create a brokerage account.
“Elon started SpaceX with the goal to change mankind and makes us a multiplanetary species,” Johnsen said. “What’s been very exciting is we have been able to expand that vision with our Starlink constellation as well as with our AI solutions.”
The roadshow details a handful of future targets by an unspecified date, including lifting gross margins to around 70% from 49% last year and generate a roughly 45% net income margin, versus negative 26% last year.
The company outlined its lofty ambitions in the video, including putting data centers in space, and its businesses including reusable rockets as well as its Starlink satellite system that provides broadband Internet access to Earth.
“We achieve what others think is really the impossible,” he said, highlighting achievements like becoming the first private company to send a liquid-filled rocket into orbit, the first to successfully dock a space craft at the International Space Station and to develop a fleet of reusable rockets.
SpaceX’s roadshow presentation is also replete with references to its rocket activities — for example, the explanation of its “repeatable business model” starts from seven, counting down to “liftoff.”
Other slides highlight Elon Musk’s business philosophy. For example, under “the algorithm,” step one is to “make the requirements less dumb,” followed by “delete the part or process step.”
Johnsen also addressed SpaceX’s massive capital expenditure, supersized by the recent February acquisition of xAI.
“We are not alone in investing meaningfully in capex, especially in the AI side of the business now,” Johnsen said. “That’s been the lion’s share of the capex deployment for the last two years.”
Johnsen presented a slide, also reflected in SpaceX’s filing, that detailed future space applications that the company might pursue. They included point-to-point travel — a concept that would entail using Starship to deliver cargo and even people to distant destinations on the globe in record timeframes.
Johnsen also highlighted asteroid mining, an unproven business case that SpaceX hadn’t expressed much interest in prior to the IPO.
The firm, formally known as Space Exploration Technologies Corp., is selling 555.6 million shares for $135 each, giving it a market value of almost $1.77 trillion, according to a filing on Wednesday. It is due to price on June 11 and trade under the symbol SPCX.
Hughes and Grush write for Bloomberg.