Welcome to Memorandum Deep Dives. In this series, we go beyond the headlines to examine the decisions shaping our digital future 🗞️. This week’s subject is SpaceX’s planned Nasdaq listing, a roughly $1.75T offering that would rank as the largest IPO in American market history, nearly three times the scale of Saudi Aramco’s 2019 record.

The obvious reading treats this as a rocket story, a referendum on Mars ambitions and the economics of reusable launch. That framing misses where the money actually sits. Starlink generated $11.4B in 2025 revenue, about 61% of the company’s sales, and $4.4B in operating income, while the space and AI segments both ran at a loss.

The substance is that connectivity funds everything else, including an AI division that lost more than $6B, and the S-1 quietly repositions a launch company as a global internet provider that happens to own its own access to orbit. That tracks a wider shift in where competitive advantage accrues, away from the hardware that reaches space and toward the recurring infrastructure that keeps users connected. A constellation of 9,600 satellites serving 10.3M subscribers across 164 countries is a compounding asset, and the market is starting to price it accordingly.

In the coming weeks, news headlines are expected to be dominated by the SpaceX IPO, which is expected to be the largest initial public offering in American stock market history. At a projected valuation of $1.75T, the June 2026 listing on the Nasdaq would surpass Saudi Aramco’s 2019 record by nearly three times, making it a genuinely singular moment in capital markets history. The coverage will understandably focus on the headline figures: the valuation, the capital raise, the rockets, and the long-standing ambition of reaching Mars. Those details are real, and the scale is difficult to overstate. Yet buried within the S-1, SpaceX’s registration statement with the SEC, is a more structurally significant story, one that has far less to do with launch vehicles than with broadband infrastructure.

Starlink is the business

SpaceX currently operates across three segments: its space and launch division, its artificial intelligence arm, built around the February 2026 acquisition of xAI, and its connectivity division, Starlink. According to the S-1, Starlink generated $11.4B in revenue in 2025, accounting for roughly 61% of the company's total revenue, and produced $4.4B in operating income. At the same time, the space division ran at a loss, and the AI division lost more than $6B. Which means that Starlink was the only segment generating meaningful profit, and that profit is what funds everything else.

The constellation that makes this possible now comprises over 9,600 satellites operating in low Earth orbit, the band of space relatively close to the planet’s surface, which allows for lower signal latency than traditional satellite systems. As of March 2026, the service had 10.3M paying subscribers across 164 countries. The satellite factory in Redmond, Washington, produces roughly 70 satellites per week, making the company the only one to operate at this scale.

This, then, becomes the kind of infrastructure that compounds quietly over decades.

What this means beyond SpaceX

The scale at which SpaceX operates and is expected to grow is unlikely to remain confined to a single company. Just as the buildout of mobile networks enabled the smartphone app economy that carriers neither predicted nor controlled, and cloud infrastructure lowered the cost of building software so dramatically that it reshaped entire industries, SpaceX’s infrastructure could create opportunities and businesses that extend far beyond SpaceX itself.

This exact thought has led many to argue that Starlink’s expansion follows a similar logic. If the constellation continues to grow, and if Apple’s recent integration of Starlink connectivity into iPhones is any indication of where mainstream consumer technology is heading, the practical effect will be a meaningful expansion of the connected population. Billions of people in rural or underserved regions who currently have limited or no reliable internet access could come online as coverage improves. The total number of people regularly using smartphones and mobile applications could grow substantially.

That is a thesis about connectivity infrastructure, not about SpaceX specifically. And it is the kind of structural shift that tends to benefit businesses whose model is built around what people do once they are connected.

A pre-IPO company making a related bet

One company that has oriented its business model around exactly this dynamic is Mode Mobile, a pre-IPO software company currently raising capital through a Regulation A+ offering, a category of SEC-qualified fundraising that allows private companies to raise money from retail investors before going public.

According to Mode Mobile’s own materials, the company has built what it describes as an ‘EarnOS,’ a software layer designed to run on existing smartphones and allow users to earn rewards through their regular device activity, browsing, streaming, and engaging with content. The company says its technology reaches over 490M users across its ecosystem and that it has generated more than $1B in earnings and savings for those users. It reported $11.8M in pro forma EBITDA for 2025, a figure the company notes includes the full-year financials of businesses it acquired through that year.

According to Deloitte’s Technology Fast 500 rankings, Mode Mobile was the fastest-growing software company in North America in 2023, based on a three-year revenue growth figure of 32,481%.

Those figures come from Mode Mobile directly and have not been independently verified. The company is privately held and not subject to the same disclosure requirements as a public company.

The connection Mode Mobile draws to the Starlink story is straightforward as a thesis: if satellite connectivity expands the global population of smartphone users, and if those users spend more time on their devices, then a platform built to monetize that existing behavior has a larger addressable market. The company has reserved the ticker $MODE on Nasdaq, indicating, according to its own disclosures, an intent to pursue a public listing within approximately 24 months. An intent to list, as the company’s own materials note, is not a guarantee that one will occur.

Whether the connectivity expansion thesis translates into the kind of growth Mode Mobile is projecting is a question the market has not yet answered. The pre-IPO price of $0.52 per share reflects the company’s own valuation of its current stage, not a market-determined price. Early-stage private investments of this kind carry risks that public market investments generally do not, including limited liquidity, limited disclosure, and significant uncertainty about whether a public offering will materialize on the expected timeline.

The wider ripple

What the SpaceX IPO is likely to do, regardless of how any individual investment in adjacent companies performs, is shift the way the market thinks about connectivity infrastructure as an asset class. For years, the commercial space industry has been framed primarily as a launch business, a service provider to governments, satellite operators, and research agencies. The S-1 reframes it as a global internet provider that happens to own its own launch infrastructure, with ambitions that extend into artificial intelligence, orbital compute, and eventually, deeper space.

That reframing has consequences for how investors evaluate the entire category of businesses that depend on, or benefit from, expanded global connectivity. The companies most visibly positioned to capture that shift are the ones closest to the infrastructure itself.

But the companies that benefit from what people do once they are connected, the application layer, the services layer, the monetization layer, are also watching this moment with considerable interest.

The SpaceX IPO is, among other things, a bet on the continued expansion of the connected world. The companies choosing to frame their stories around that expansion are making the same underlying bet, at different stages of maturity, different levels of risk, and different degrees of proven execution.

How that plays out will depend on whether Starlink’s growth trajectory holds, whether the newly connected populations behave as the models assume, and whether the businesses positioned to serve them can scale fast enough to matter.

Those are open questions, and the IPO doesn’t answer any of them. It does, however, make them considerably harder to ignore.

Disclaimers

Mode Mobile recently received its ticker reservation with Nasdaq ($MODE), indicating an intent to IPO in the next 24 months. An intent to IPO is no guarantee that an actual IPO will occur.

¹ Pro forma EBITDA includes full-year numbers of the businesses acquired through 2025.

The Deloitte rankings are based on submitted applications and public company database research, with winners selected based on their fiscal-year revenue growth percentage over a three-year period.

References to SpaceX, Starlink, Tesla, Apple, and Elon Musk are for illustrative and editorial purposes only and do not imply any affiliation with or endorsement of Mode Mobile.