Dan Ives spills the beans on SpaceX future

The best investments are usually the ones you are not allowed to make. By the time a great company finally opens its doors to the public, the people who got in early have already collected the part of the story worth telling. What reaches everyone else tends to be the receipt, marked up and handed over with a smile.

Wall Street has run on that arrangement for the better part of a century. The richest growth stories stay locked behind private funding rounds, sovereign wealth funds, and venture firms until the easy upside has thinned, and only then do they get repackaged for the rest of us as an initial public offering.

One company has kept that wall taller and standing longer than almost any rival. It launches more than half of the world's orbital missions, it was last valued in private markets near $400 billion, and for everyday investors it has been a thing to read about, never a stock to own.

That company is SpaceX, and the wall is finally coming down. The rocket maker has filed to go public, and one of the loudest voices on Wall Street says the listing itself is the least interesting part of what happens next. Dan Ives, the Wedbush Securities analyst famous for his maximalist calls on Tesla (TSLA), has been telling anyone who will listen where this is really headed.

Why the SpaceX IPO is bigger than one stock

The filing makes it official. SpaceX, expected to trade under the ticker SPCX, filed its S-1 on May 20 and is aiming for a Nasdaq debut around June 12, targeting a valuation of up to $1.75 trillion and a raise of roughly $75 billion, which would make it "the largest IPO in history," according to Electrek.

Put that in human terms. A debut near $1.75 trillion would price SpaceX above all but a tiny handful of public companies on the planet. A single share would buy a slice of rockets, the Starlink satellite network, and the artificial intelligence work Musk has been pulling into the company. For most people, it is the first time any of it has been purchasable.

Ives has been blunt about the timing. He told CNBC that for an offering of this scale, "I think the time is right."

His read is that the listing does not pull money away from Tesla so much as widen the menu of ways to bet on Musk.

When I ran the SpaceX target against Tesla's roughly $1.6 trillion market value, the arithmetic got interesting fast. Two Musk companies, public at the same time, would together rival the largest corporate empires ever built. And that is before anyone talks about combining them.