The SpaceX IPO, European Sovereignty, and the Trillion-Dollar Question for Private Markets

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What the biggest IPO in history could mean for European venture capital, and why it's connected to the defence tech boom you're already seeing

Before we get to the $1.5 trillion valuation and what it means for European capital markets, a quick detour to the west coast of Ireland.

Cork-based SUAS Aerospace, is developing two spaceports with the goal of making Ireland a working orbital launch hub. The pitch is grounded in physics. Ireland's Atlantic coastline provides direct, unobstructed access to polar and low-Earth orbits, with a temperate climate suited to year-round operations.

SUAS is already part of the EU-BEST consortium, awarded €4.9 million under Horizon Europe to develop interoperable rocket engine testing infrastructure, and has secured launch partnerships with Dutch propulsion firm T-Minus Engineering. The company is targeting full operational capability by 2027, with capacity for up to 48 launches annually.

We mention SUAS because it’s an example of European tech sovereignty in action at a time of shifting geopolitical realities, and in the context of Europe’s attempt to build the physical and financial infrastructure to participate in the space economy, not just observe it.

 SpaceX as a private markets event

SpaceX is expected to go public this year in what could be the largest IPO in history, with a target valuation of around $1.5 trillion and plans to raise significantly more than $30 billion, surpassing Saudi Aramco's $29 billion listing in 2019.

We're not going to spend this edition dissecting SpaceX's valuation multiples, maybe something for another edition. Instead, we want to explore what a SpaceX IPO means for the European venture capital ecosystem, particularly at a moment when Europe is pouring historic amounts of capital into defence, space and sovereign technology.

SpaceX has been privately held for over two decades, growing from a startup into the world's most valuable private company. It set six consecutive annual launch records, reaching 170 launches in 2025, more than the rest of the world combined. Starlink surpassed 9 million subscribers globally by the end of 2025, with revenue estimates for the year ranging from $15.5 billion to $19 billion. In February 2026, SpaceX completed its acquisition of xAI in an all-stock deal valued at roughly $1.25 trillion, folding Starlink, Grok and the X platform into a single corporate umbrella.

For most of that journey, retail investors had no access. The IPO would change that. The vast majority of SpaceX's value creation happened while it was private. By the time it lists, early investors will have already captured the most transformative returns. It's the same dynamic we talk about regularly in this newsletter: when you're locked out of private markets, you miss the part of the curve where the real wealth is built.

So what does this have to do with Europe? Three things.

First: the SpaceX IPO will reset expectations for the entire space and defence tech sector

When a company goes public at $1.5 trillion, it doesn't just affect its own shareholders. It re-prices the entire category.

Europe's defence, security and resilience sector raised a record $8.7 billion in VC funding in 2025, up 55% year-on-year and four times what it was in 2020. Defence tech now accounts for 13% of all venture capital in Europe, up from less than 1% before 2020. The AI-focused defence sub-sector alone attracted $929 million in 2025, led by Helsing's €600 million Series D at a €12 billion valuation. The global space economy sits at around $630 billion today and is projected to reach $1.8 trillion by 2035, with European startups increasingly building across satellite intelligence, autonomous platforms, secure communications and Earth observation.

A SpaceX IPO puts a public market spotlight on exactly these categories. It validates the sector at a scale no European company has yet achieved and creates a benchmark against which European space and defence ventures will be measured.

Second: it highlights Europe's sovereignty gap, and the capital response already underway

Governments around the world are watching a single American company consolidate dominance across launch, satellite broadband, government communications via Starshield, and now AI infrastructure. In 2025, Europe conducted five orbital launches. SpaceX completed 170. Europe accounts for just 12% of global VC investment in space launch vehicles.

European governments are responding. The EU's ReArm Europe plan aims to mobilise up to €800 billion in defence spending through 2029. The NATO Summit in The Hague set a new 3.5% GDP defence spending target for 2035. Seventeen EU member states have already activated fiscal escape clauses to increase defence budgets. The EU's Defence Equity Facility channels institutional capital into sovereign defence and space technologies; the NATO Innovation Fund, a €1 billion vehicle, now participates in over a third of all European defence rounds; and the EU's IRIS2 satellite constellation, Europe's answer to Starlink for secure governmental communications, is targeted for deployment by 2030.

On the private side, Seraphim Space is the clearest barometer of the shift. Founded in 2016, the London-based firm pioneered SpaceTech as a distinct investment category, launching both the world's first private VC fund and the world's first publicly listed fund devoted exclusively to the sector. Its most recent early-stage fund surpassed its €84 million target with LPs including Eutelsat, NEC, Sky Perfect JSAT and the UK's National Security Strategic Investment Fund. Seraphim's own tracker recorded $12.4 billion deployed globally across SpaceTech in 2025, a new annual peak. As CEO Mark Boggett noted at the close: the SpaceX-xAI merger is a direct validation of the view that SpaceTech is becoming the foundational enabler for AI and the digital systems powering the global economy.

This isn't about competing with SpaceX on rockets. It's about ensuring Europe has sovereign capabilities in the categories that become strategically essential precisely because one company is consolidating so much of the market.

Third: SpaceX IPO liquidity could flow back into European deal flow

A SpaceX IPO at $1.5 trillion, or even at a fraction of that, would generate enormous liquidity for its existing investors. Early backers, including Sequoia, Fidelity and Google Ventures, would be sitting on some of the largest venture returns in history. Historically, when a mega-exit creates liquidity at this scale, a significant portion gets recycled into new investments in the same category. We're already seeing US investors account for 40-50% of late-stage European defence tech rounds. A SpaceX IPO could accelerate that dynamic as newly liquid investors look for the next generation of space, defence and dual-use technology companies, many of which are being built in Europe.

This is a pattern we've seen before. The liquidity wave from the 2020-2021 tech IPO boom recycled into venture capital and fuelled the record fundraising environment that followed. A SpaceX IPO could do something similar for the space and defence tech category specifically.

A note on the SpaceX paradox

SpaceX may be Europe's biggest competitive threat in space, but it's also one of the biggest structural enablers of European space tech.

Twenty years ago, putting a kilogram of payload into orbit cost around $10,000. SpaceX's Falcon 9 brought that down to roughly $2,500 per kilogram, a reduction of around 75%. Starship, at operational scale, could push this toward $200 per kilogram. European startups building satellites and Earth observation platforms don't need to build their own rockets to benefit from radically cheaper access to orbit. ICEYE built a synthetic aperture radar constellation that would have been financially unthinkable a decade ago, partly on the back of those economics. Reusable rockets are now proven technology; Europe can adapt that knowledge to sovereign needs and move faster than would have been possible at the frontier.

The harder SpaceX pushes on launch economics, the more viable it makes the downstream satellite economy that European companies are well-positioned to serve.

What this means for private market investors

Private markets are where the value gets created. SpaceX grew from zero to $1.5 trillion as a private company. The space and defence tech sectors are being shaped right now, in private markets, by companies that won't be publicly listed for years. By the time retail investors can buy in, the trajectory has already been set.

Sector formation follows structural forces. European defence and space tech didn't become categories because a few VCs decided they were interesting. They became categories because governments started spending hundreds of billions, because geopolitical events reshaped threat perceptions, and because regulatory frameworks were redesigned to channel capital. Understanding those forces, rather than chasing headlines, is what separates informed investors from reactive ones.

The IPO window matters for everyone. When SpaceX goes public, it will reprice an entire category, generate liquidity that flows into new investments, and validate a sector that European startups are actively building in. The downstream effects of a single listing can shape deal flow and capital availability for years.

The bottom line

The SpaceX IPO isn't just a financial event. It's a signal about where capital is moving, what sectors are being repriced, and why European sovereign technology investment is accelerating. The same forces driving the biggest IPO in history are driving the emergence of European space and defence tech as a distinct venture capital category: the convergence of technology, geopolitics and government spending at a scale we haven't seen in a generation.

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The Unsophisticated Investor is brought to you by Scott & Rob, the founders of Shuttle. We’re both sick of private markets being a playground exclusive to the ultra-wealthy so we started a company to challenge the status-quo. Shuttle’s singular focus is to unlock private markets for Millennial and Gen Z tech professionals and help them build wealth through the highest performing private market opportunities.

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Shuttle Co-Founders