Three weeks from now, on the 12th of June 2026, a company that makes rockets will attempt to become the most valuable publicly listed business in the history of capitalism. Not Apple, Not Nvidia. Not Saudi Aramco. Space X.
The numbers involved are so large that they start to feel fictional. A valuation somewhere between £1.4 and £1.6 trillion. A potential fundraises of up to £63 billion, dwarfing every IPO prior to it, including the previous record of Saudi’s Aramco in 2019. The company’s own prospectus, which was filed with the US Securities and Exchange commission on the 20th of May 2026, puts its total addressable market at £22.5 trillion. That is not a typo. That is roughly equivalent to the annual economic output of the United States.
And the banks managing this deal? Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, both of which have major operations in Canary Wharf, roughly two miles from the most deprived borough in London.
That detail really matters. Because the SpaceX IPO is not just a story about rockets and billionaires. It is a story about where the world’s capital is flowing, what it is being asked to do for the planet, and who gets left out of the conversation entirely.
What SpaceX Actually is Now
Most people think of SpaceX as the company that lands rockets on drone ships in the Atlantic. And whilst that is still true the IPO prospectus tells us a more complicated story about what it has become in 2026.
The business has four main arms. First, the launch division, which in 2025 conducted more orbital missions than any other company on Earth, controlling well over half of all global orbital launches. Second, Starlink, the satellite internet service that now has over nine million subscribers globally. Third, Starship, the next generation rocket so large that it has already triggered environmental protects outside of SpaceX’s Texas facility. And fourth, an AI infrastructure business boom from a merger with Elon Musk’s xAI company, which lost £2 billion in its first quarter of operation as it builds orbital data centres.
That last part is important. Despite Starlink being profitable, generating an operating profit of around £950 million, SpaceX reported a net loss of nearly £3.4 billion in the first quarter of 2026 against £3.7 billion in revenue. The investment thesis rests entirely on future dominance, not current earnings. One analyst at Motley Fool UK described the valuation as sitting on sixty-seven times projected sales, roughly three times the multiple applied to Nvidia. The company will go public burning cash and asking investors to trust the vision.
Some are more than willing. Others are asking harder questions.
The pension Fund Revolt
On the 14th of May 2026, the leaders of three of the largest public pension funds in the United States sent a letter to Elon Musk. These finds, run by New York State comptroller’s Thomas DiNapoli, Mark Levine, and CalPERS chief executive Marcie Frost, collectively oversee more than £790 billion in retirement assets.
Their letter called the panned governance structure of the SpaceX IPO “extreme” and the “most management-favourable governance structure ever brought to the US public markets at this scale.” What they objected to specifically: a dual class share structure that would hand Musk roughly 80 percent of voting control. A provision that would allow only Class B shareholders, meaning essentially Musk himself, to remove him as chief executive or chair. A mandatory arbitration clause for shareholder claims under US federal securities laws that would kill class action lawsuits entirely. And a reincorporation in Texas, where state law requires shareholders to hold 3 percent of outstanding stock to bring a derivative suit, which at a £1.4 trillion valuation means owning tens of billions of pounds worth of shares before you can challenge the board on anything.
In plain English: you can put your pension into this company, but you cannot hold it to account.
UK and European pension funds are watching this closely too. Responsible Investor reported last week that British institutional investors have raised similar governance flags, concerned about the conflict between SpaceX’s ownership structure and their own fiduciary duties under UK law.
The prediction markets are currently pricing in a 71 percent chance that the IPO completes by the end of June regardless. The governance concerns may slow things down. They however are unlikely to stop them.
The Climate Finance Problem Nobody Wants to Name
Now here is the question that the green finance world is quietly wrestling with and not yet answering out loud.
SpaceX has positioned itself as a climate-positive company. The prospectus talks about Starlink reducing reliance on energy-hungry terrestrial data centres. The orbital data centres, powered by solar panels, are presented as a net gain for the planet. Reusable rockets, the arguments go, reduce the per-launch environmental cost of reaching orbit dramatically.
That case is not entirely wrong. But it does not tell you the full story.
A single Starship launch releases approximately 76,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent, according to Andrew Wilson, assistant professor in environmental management at Glasgow Caledonian University. SpaceX conducted 324 launches worldwide in 2025, a record. The company plans to accelerate well beyond that. The rocket exhaust includes on just carbon dioxide, but black carbon and nitrogen oxides deposited directly into the upper atmosphere, a region so poorly understood that scientists have called it the “Ignorosphere.” A study published in February 2026 and covered by Inside Climate News found that for the first time, debris from a specific spacecraft disintegration had been traced and measured in the near-space region between 80 and 110 kilometres above Earth, where changes can affect the stratosphere and the ozone layer.
The UN university warned last year that commercial space activity is now growing faster than the voluntary environmental guidelines designed to govern it. There is no binding international framework for rocket emissions. None. And the Financial Conduct Authority, which regulates the very banks leading the SpaceX IPO from Canary Wharf, has spent the last two years building out a world-leading sustainable finance framework, including climate disclosure rules and ESG labelling requirements.
Those rules currently have nothing to say about Starship.
FCA chair Ashley Alder gave a speech in October 2025 setting out the UK’s ambition to become the global centre for sustainable finance. He made no mention of the space sector. That gap, between the climate finance rulebook that applies to solar panels and green bonds and the growing atmospheric footprint of the rocket industry, is where the SpaceX IPO sits. And it is a gap that the banks of Canary Wharf, who will collect hundreds of millions in underwriting fees from this deal, have a direct interest in not drawing attention to.
What This Has to Do with Tower Hamlets
Starlink has 110,000 subscribers in the UK as of mid-2025, according to Ofcom, data. Almost all of them are in rural areas. The pitch for Starlink in Britain is about reaching places that fibre cannot reach, route farms in Cumbria, fishing communities in the Scottish Islands etc.
In November 2025, BT group and Starlink announced a partnership to bring satellite broadband to the hardest to reach parts of the UK, with services expected in the second half of 2026.
This all sounds straightforward. But here is the tension.
Tower hamlets is not a remote farm. It is a dense, urban, inner-London borough a short walk from some of the most digitally advanced infrastructure on the planet. And yet, a May 2025 report commissioned by the council and produced by FarrPoint, an independent digital consultancy, found that digital exclusion in Tower Hamlets is shapes by a complex mix of age, disability, housing tenure, language, and economic status. The two groups most at risk are social renters with multiple barriers and older social renters more complex needs. The report flagged concerns that funding for digital inclusion work would be cut, and the very moment the borough needs it most.
Meanwhile the Indices of Deprivation 2025, published by the government in November, confirmed that Tower Hamlets and Hackney have the highest rates of income deprivation affecting children and older people anywhere in England. The present of deprivation running from Enfield through Haringey, Hackney, Tower Hamlets, Newham, Barking and Dagenham is the most consistently deprived corridor in the country.
Starlink is planning on two new gateway earth stations in England, one in Harlow Essex and one in Mulberry Wharf London, currently pending Ofcom approval. Mulberry Wharf is in Tower Hamlets.
There is a certain poetry to that. A SpaceX ground station, feeding a network that will help bankroll that largest IPO in history, sitting in one of the poorest boroughs in England, where thousands of residents cannot afford the subscription, it sells.
The Global Macro Picture and What It Means Here
The SpaceX IPO does not exist in isolation. It is arriving at a particular moment in the global economy, and that moment is complicated.
The IPO market has been recovering after three sluggish years. Wall Street analyst has been talking about a 2026 renaissance, with SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic all potentially listing this year. CNBC reported last week that some analysts are now warning the cluster of mega IPOs could signal a market too, the kind if exuberant moment in a cycle where the big deals arrive just as the sentiment peaks.
For UK markets and for East London specifically, the stakes are significant. The Canary Wharf banks are managing and advising on this deal will generate enormous fee income. Goldman Sachs alone, in the lead-left position on the prospects will take a share of underwriting fees that could hit £63 billion. That money will flow through London’s financial system. Some of it will be taxed here. Some of it will pay the salaries of analysts and traders in Docklands.
But the Bank of England’s cautious approach to rate cuts means that broader macro picture for East London households remains tight. Mortgage rates are still elevated. Rents are still rising. The repossession rate in Newham is still the highest in the capital. The capital that circulates in Canary Wharf does not automatically find its way to the streets around it. The SpaceX windfall, if it comes, will follow the same path.
There is also a currency and markets question that is not being spoken about enough. A £1.4 trillion listing in the US will pull institutional capital from across the world, including from UK pension funds and investment trusts. Scottish Mortgage Investment Trust, which trades on the London Stock Exchange and is one of the most popular vehicles for Bristol retail investors, already holds SpaceX exposure and is widely expected to take a significant portion in SPCX once it lists. That is not inherently bad. But it means UK savers, including many in East London, will indirectly own a stake in a company whose governance structure the largest American pension funds have called dangerous, and whose environmental impact operates in a regulatory vacuum.
The Honest Reckoning
SpaceX is a genuinely extraordinary company. The engineering achievements of the last decade, landing orbital-class rockets, building a satellite network from scratch that now genuinely connects underserved communities in dozens of counties, developing a vehicle that may eventually put humans on Mars, are not small things. The people who believe in the vision are not fools.
But the SpaceX IPO is also a test of whether the financial system has learned anything from the last decade of ESG promises, green bond insurance and climate disclosure frameworks. Those frameworks were built on the premise that capital markets could be pointed at the climate crisis. That investors with long time horizons, like pension funds managing the retirement savings of teachers and nurses, could demand accountability, better governance, lower emissions and more equitable outcomes.
The three pension fund bosses who wrote to Elon Musk last week, were in a small but meaningful way, trying to bank on that leverage. they were told, implicitly that the deal does not need them.
In Tower Hamlets, a Starlink ground station is being planned. In Newham, families are being evicted at the highest rate in London. In Canary Wharf, the banks are counting their fees.
Three weeks from now, a rocket company will ring the bell on Nasdaq and become the most valuable listed business on the planet. Whether that changes anything for East London depends on questions that nobody in the prospectus has thought to ask.
