The first of three days closed at Starbase on Tuesday with the agenda SpaceX had promised and none of the answers Wall Street wanted. Wall Street aerospace analysts toured the production floor, sat through a full-day financial briefing, and signed the confidentiality papers Bret Johnsen's team required before handing over the excerpted S-1. [1] Wednesday brings a fresh cohort — the pension funds and mutual funds that will actually carry the $75 billion raise. Thursday is Memphis, where the "Macrohard" data center gets its first walk-through. [2]

The paper's Tuesday read at 109x peak-cycle EBITDA described a syndicate of 21 banks assembling around a $1.75 trillion price tag, with Morgan Stanley, Goldman, JPMorgan, Bank of America and Citigroup as active bookrunners. [3] That structure does not change by the day's end. What changes on analyst days — when they work — is the private willingness of those banks to commit balance sheet to the underwriting. No bank has yet confirmed that commitment on the record. Reuters reported only that executives "aim" for a late-June trading debut. [2]

The numbers analysts saw are tight. The confidential filing disclosed cash of roughly $24.7 billion at year-end 2025 against liabilities exceeding $50 billion, with the xAI merger pushing consolidated bottom-line from a $791 million profit into a reported loss. [1] Starlink and rockets are expected to produce revenue approaching $20 billion in 2026, per Bloomberg Intelligence. [4] The $1.75 trillion valuation survives only if Starlink's recurring revenue is treated as the durable asset, which is what the Tuesday briefing was built to argue.

Two structural features attract the hedging. The dual-class share proposal preserves Musk's voting control at a moment when most institutional mandates have tightened against founder-perpetuity structures. The 30 percent retail allocation — triple the normal IPO share — shifts distribution risk to channels that require retail conversion to work. Both features make the deal easier to market and harder for risk committees to approve at trillion-dollar size.

The one data point the day produced: analysts were reportedly given access to the confidential registration filing but, Reuters wrote, "the document offered only a narrow window into the company's finances." [2] Which is to say Johnsen is still rationing. A CFO two months from the largest IPO in history, at a multiple that demands belief, does not ration unless the disclosure is the lever.

SpaceX will hold a separate "modeling day" for a smaller circle of analysts roughly two weeks after the tours conclude, a session where earnings estimates get built before trading begins. [2] The banks' commitment — the verdict the paper is tracking — arrives at that fork, not this one. Wednesday's institutional session will be the tell. The instruments the bookrunners use to price the offering will lead the paper, not the president's.

-- THEO KAPLAN, San Francisco