Data centers in space, moon hotels, human life on Mars. Those were just some of the ambitious opportunities Elon Musk laid out to JPMorgan Chase (JPM) CEO Jamie Dimon when asked why his rocket company SpaceX (SPAX.PVT) needed to go public now.
The remarks came Thursday evening during a SpaceX pitch JPMorgan hosted at its Manhattan headquarters. It’s part of a broader push by Wall Street to drum up demand for what’s anticipated to be the world’s largest IPO. The interview was streamed on Musk owned social media platform X.
SpaceX is expected to raise $75 billion at a valuation of $1.75 trillion and list on Friday, June 12.
“The TLDR … we’re embarking on a massive new growth phase, and we need capital for that,” Musk told Dimon.
Musk said SpaceX has been cash-flow positive since roughly 2014 or 2015. Prior private fundraising rounds were mostly used to provide liquidity for employees and investors rather than to raise new capital. What has changed, he said, is that SpaceX is entering a much larger capital-intensive phase.
Along with building cities on the moon and Mars, Musk’s pitch focused on how the money raised from the IPO would go to his vision for building space AI data centers. Musk argued that it was “the primary means by which AI can be expanded.”
“It’s increasingly difficult to build power plants on the ground. There are very few people who want a power plant in their backyard,” Musk said.
“I think we can do probably somewhere around one terawatt per year of AI space compute from Earth, but we can do 1000 terawatts or more from the moon,” he added.
SpaceX will also send 100,000 new satellites into space and expand Starlink internet service, its most profitable enterprise, with the IPO proceeds, per Musk.
The public debut of Elon Musk’s rocket and AI company is expected to make history.

The JPMorgan event followed a fireside chat with SpaceX COO Gwynne Shotwell hosted by Bank of America earlier on Thursday. In a similar fashion, that event was aimed at rallying BofA’s massive network of financial advisers, known in past years as the “thundering herd.”
Along with BofA and JPMorgan, 21 other major lenders are helping take SpaceX public, with Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley (MS) leading the charge. Fees aside, banks are eager to outdo each other with SpaceX for prestige and the potential for future client business.
Videos of rockets taking off adorn the lobby of the Goldman Sachs headquarters. For its office, JPMorgan has brought in a rocket sculpture by artist Dustin Yellin and various space rocks and meteorite fragments from Yellin’s private collection.








