SpaceX shares slipped 3% in premarket trading Thursday, extending a 5% decline from the prior session, as the momentum that carried the stock more than 40% above its IPO price showed signs of fading.
The company priced its initial public offering at $135 per share last week, immediately vaulting into the ranks of the world's most valuable publicly traded companies. At Wednesday's market close, SpaceX carried a valuation of $2.52 trillion — just below Amazon — after briefly surpassing Microsoft in the days following its debut.
The governance structure accompanying that valuation gives outside shareholders limited recourse. Elon Musk controls more than 82% of voting rights at SpaceX and holds shares in the company worth over $1 trillion. He serves simultaneously as chairman, chief executive, and technology chief.
On Wednesday, SpaceX announced the appointment of Roelof Botha — a longtime Musk ally — as an independent director and member of the company's audit committee, effective immediately. Botha becomes the eighth member of the SpaceX board.
Musk, posting on X on Sunday, said the company "might be able to reach approximately" $1 trillion in revenue in 2030.
As the stock cooled, California officials were attempting to quantify how much the SpaceX IPO — and anticipated public offerings from OpenAI and Anthropic later this year — might add to state tax coffers.
The question carries weight. SpaceX's Hawthorne, California, campus minted many employees as paper millionaires following the listing. Both Anthropic and OpenAI, which each filed confidential S-1s in recent weeks, are expected to go public at valuations that could approach $1 trillion.
For historical context, Facebook's 2012 IPO — when the Menlo Park company was valued at $104 billion — generated an estimated $1.3 billion in California income taxes, according to the California Department of Finance. The far larger valuations of today's IPO class have led some observers to project proportionally larger windfalls.
But experts and financial advisors cautioned that the revenue impact may fall short of those projections, citing structural differences in how today's tech employees are compensated and hedged.
A key factor is the single-trigger RSU structure that SpaceX has long used. At most private companies, restricted stock units vest only after two conditions are met — continued employment and a liquidity event such as an IPO. That dual-trigger arrangement creates a surge in taxable income on the day of the offering. SpaceX employees, however, have been paying income taxes on their RSUs for years as vesting was tied solely to employment tenure, meaning much of that tax revenue was pulled forward ahead of the IPO.
"Relative to past IPOs, tax revenues from the SpaceX IPO are likely to be less immediate and more unpredictable," the California Legislative Analyst's Office said in a statement.
The LAO, which advises state lawmakers on budget and fiscal matters, has not published revenue estimates for any of the three pending or recent IPOs. The California Department of Finance has also withheld estimates, citing the frequency with which companies delay offerings during market downturns.
A further complication is the growing use of pre-IPO secondary markets and tender offers. In October, OpenAI finalized a secondary share sale totaling $6.6 billion, allowing current and former employees to sell shares at a $500 billion valuation. Such transactions reduce the concentration of stock-based income that would otherwise be recognized at IPO.
Advisors also pointed to donor-advised funds as an increasingly accessible tax mitigation tool. Richard Lowry, managing director and head of tax strategy at wealth manager Cresset, said donations of private, pre-IPO shares to donor-advised funds — once limited to ultra-wealthy founders — have become available to a broader class of startup employees. "Now there is a cottage industry around allowing people to avail themselves of this," Lowry said.
The LAO maintained a measured optimism regardless, noting that "past major tech IPOs have generated significant income tax revenue for the state and these upcoming IPOs certainly have the potential to do the same."
How much of that potential materializes will depend heavily on the financial decisions of individual shareholders — and on whether OpenAI and Anthropic maintain their IPO timelines through the rest of 2026.
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