New to IPOs? An IPO ("initial public offering") is the first time a private company sells shares to the public. It is genuinely hard to judge because there is little trading history and a lot of hype. The trick is to slow down and answer five questions in order — business, valuation, risk, mechanics, verdict. That structure is what stops you buying a story instead of a business. Below, I use SpaceX as the worked example — the same five steps you can run on any IPO.

What's the xAI merger really about? SpaceX absorbed Elon Musk's AI company in February 2026 in an all-stock deal. The pitch is "space + AI" — picture data centres in orbit, powered by Starlink connectivity. But xAI is burning an estimated $1 billion a month on compute, and the deal also brought X (formerly Twitter) onto the SpaceX balance sheet. One real offset the S-1 does disclose: Anthropic has agreed to pay SpaceX around $1.25 billion a month through May 2029 for AI compute at its Colossus data centre — a sizeable contracted revenue line set against that burn. Bulls see vertical integration; bears see complexity and cash drain. This is exactly the kind of "story" line item to interrogate, not accept.