Elon Musk’s SpaceX is just days away from a historic stock market debut set to shatter all norms, drawing huge excitement from Wall Street’s financial wizards even as skeptics question whether the rocket maker can ever turn a profit.

The company will stop taking investor orders on Wednesday and set a price for Thursday, as the world’s most anticipated initial public offering (IPO) pushes toward its expected Nasdaq debut on Friday.

“Demand is shaping up very well,” Renaissance Capital’s Matthew Kennedy said of the transaction. It aims to raise $75 billion in a record-breaking IPO.

“There’s no question that there’s a ton of hype around it. Nothing captures the imagination like space,” which is why the stock “has generated excitement in a way that few other stocks can,” Kennedy added.

The company — which makes rockets, provides satellite internet through its Starlink network, and recently merged with Musk’s artificial intelligence firm xAI — will offer more than 555 million shares at an expected price of $135, placing SpaceX among Wall Street’s most elite companies with a valuation of about $1.8 trillion.

That valuation — and the success of the IPO — depends on investors’ confidence in Musk as a visionary entrepreneur. After the offering, the tech multi-billionaire will hold more than 82 percent of the voting power, strengthening his hold on one of the world’s most valuable companies.

And amid reports that demand is already outstripping inflated expectations, the launch price could rise even further.

“We’ve seen extraordinary excitement, unlike anything we’ve heard before when it comes to IPOs,” said Eva Ardos, chief investment strategist at ERShares, which owns a stake in SpaceX through a special purpose private fund.

For Bokeh Capital Partners’ Kim Forrest, SpaceX embodies the “cool” factor thanks to Musk’s marketing savvy.

About one-third of the shares will be set aside for everyday investors — many of whom are Musk loyalists — a much larger portion than typical IPO offers.

Destroyer of capital?

While SpaceX’s launch has generated a lot of buzz, there are also questions about whether Musk’s promise to put data centers in space and send rockets to Mars will actually materialize and turn a profit.

Analysts say the company’s Starlink Internet service looks like a safe bet to make money.

But SpaceX’s big spending on cutting-edge artificial intelligence is expected to bleed money — at least for a few years.

“SpaceX is probably not something that will ever end up in my portfolio,” Forrest said.

The numbers tell a complicated story: SpaceX brought in $18.7 billion in revenue in 2025, up 33 percent from the year before — but it still lost $4.9 billion.

Research firm Morningstar looked at SpaceX’s actual business and concluded that it should be worth about $780 billion — less than half of the $1.8 trillion Musk is asking for.

David Morrison of Trade Nation put the central question bluntly: “Is this true democratization, the likes of which has never been seen before on Wall Street? Or is it a cynical attempt to foist an extraordinarily expensive and highly speculative enterprise on a gullible public?”

The IPO Barometer

Despite the risks, analysts pointed to the recent multi-billion-dollar AI computing deal that SpaceX signed with Google and AI company Anthropic as the reason valuations may be stalling.

“If people are willing to pay that price and invest for the future, that’s a good sign for the market,” said Peter Cardillo of Spartan Capital Securities.

How SpaceX performs could set the stage for highly anticipated IPOs by AI companies Anthropic and OpenAI, which have generated enormous buzz of their own on Wall Street.

“This has the real potential to issue an IPO if (SpaceX) does poorly, or start a new IPO rebound if it does well,” Kennedy said.