'Project Apex': SpaceX has enlisted 21 banks to help prepare its IPO - Reuters

Elon Musk's aerospace company SpaceX has engaged a pool of more than twenty financial organizations to prepare its IPO, Reuters reported citing sources. The internal plan to prepare for the listing was named Project Apex (from Latin - "apex" or the highest, furthest point).

According to Reuters, Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, Bank of America and Citigroup will be the lead organizers of the SpaceX offering. Five Wall Street giants will assume the role of active bookrunners - the lead banks managing the deal. Sixteen other financial institutions are involved in the listing in less significant roles. This is one of the largest consortiums of underwriters in recent years, the agency stresses.

These include major players such as Spain's Banco Santander, Britain's Barclays, Germany's Deutsche Bank, the Netherlands' ING, Japan's Mizuho and Switzerland's UBS, Reuters' sources said. The banks will take over the distribution of SpaceX shares to institutional, retail and large private investors (HNWIs) in selected geographic regions, they said.

As the agency found out, the SpaceX IPO project has been internally codenamed Project Apex. Unlike the names of other initiatives of Elon Musk, such as speed modes Ludicrous and Plaid in Tesla or neural network Grok, the word Apex does not contain obvious references to pop culture and science fiction. In astronautics, the term refers to the highest point of a flight trajectory. In a financial context, it may refer to the scale of SpaceX's listing, which could be a record in the history of Wall Street.

The involvement of large-scale consortiums of underwriters for the largest IPOs has become a trend in recent years, notes Reuters. In 2023, British chip developer ARM Holdings engaged almost 30 financial institutions in preparation for listing. Alibaba Group formed a similar pool of organizing banks to prepare for its listing in 2014.

The management of SpaceX, headed by Elon Musk, last week increased the target for funds raised at the IPO by one and a half times, the Financial Times reported, citing sources. According to them, at a private meeting with investors, top managers announced plans to raise about $75 billion instead of the previous $50 billion. Now Musk expects a business valuation of $1.75 trillion. At the same time discussed the allocation of up to 30% of the outstanding shares to retail investors - three times higher than the standard quota, say the interlocutors Reuters. SpaceX is expected to file for an IPO in the coming days, with the aim of being on the stock exchange in June, in time for Musk's birthday and a parade of planets.

This article was AI-translated and verified by a human editor