SpaceX IPO Whispers Trigger Wall Street Hunger Games… One Familiar Face Pulls Ahead of the Pack

Wall Street just cracked open the launchpad doors… and (surprise, surprise!) Morgan Stanley is standing closest to the big red button.

According to reports, Morgan Stanley is shaping up as the front-runner to run SpaceX’s eventual IPO… a deal that could suck the oxygen out of every other listing the year it hits. 

And sure, the bake-off is still technically happening, the cigars are still in the drawers, and nobody’s been crowned luckiest banker in history yet… but let’s be real here, the Musk-Morgan Stanley relationship has more history than most Silicon Valley marriages.

And yes, Elon Musk’s fingerprints are all over this (proceeds to put on Brofessor glasses).

For instance, Morgan Stanley helped take Tesla public back in 2010. They later rode shotgun on Musk’s chaotic 2022 Twitter (now X) acquisition. One of their bankers, Anthony Armstrong, is now CFO at Musk’s AI startup xAI. Another former Morgan Stanley banker runs Musk’s family office. Needless to say, calling them “bankers” feels wrong. They’re more like Elon’s financial immune system.

(Source: Reuters)

And in the rare shocker that Morgan Stanley proceeds to F’ this up and piss Elon off…. the competition isn’t a bunch of no names either. Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase are both in the mix, circling the biggest IPO rumor since Saudi Aramco took that award. But when Musk picks a partner, familiarity tends to beat pedigree.

So why is this suddenly a thing?

In a staff memo last week, SpaceX CFO Bret Johnsen told employees the company is preparing for a public offering in 2026… emphasis on preparing. Translation: nothing is guaranteed, markets could get dumped, and Elon could wake up one morning and decide Mars needs the money more than Wall Street does.

And if Morgan Stanley somehow trips over its own loafers and annoys Elon, the sharks are already circling. Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase are both lurking, ready to fight to the death over a potential $25 billion IPO… the largest one since Saudi Aramco broke the internet.

Which raises the obvious question… but didn’t Musk swear SpaceX would stay private forever? Correct. He did. Repeatedly. Loudly.

But that changed when Starlink started pulling in billions a year… roughly $6+ billion by current estimates. That’s the moment the math wins. And as when one arm of the business is minting cash and the other needs tens of billions to keep pushing forward, public markets stop looking scary and start looking pretty darn useful to Elon.

Nothing here is guaranteed. The IPO lives or dies on market conditions, execution, and Wall Street’s ability to keep it together. There’s still a meaningful chance it never leaves the launchpad.

But if SpaceX does go public… Morgan Stanley looks like it’s already strapped into the captain’s chair, hands hovering over the controls, waiting for Musk to say the magic words. “Launch.”

At the time of publishing this article, Stocks.News holds positions in Tesla as mentioned in the article.