The Nasdaq listing of SpaceX, the American space company set to reshape the landscape of global capital markets, is just around the corner. Investors worldwide are stirring over the "IPO of the century," which will raise a staggering $75 billion (about 115 trillion won) and instantly create a company ranked among the world's top 10 by market capitalization.
Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk had been skeptical of an IPO ever since founding SpaceX. He had dismissed listing plans, saying it "would only be possible in the very distant future, when Mars transport ships fly on regular schedules." While many variables likely played into Musk's change of heart at this point, the decisive factors are probably his expanded ambition through building space data centers and the explosion in funding demand driven by the intensifying global race for technological supremacy.
In the market, voices of caution are as loud as the expectations. Controversy over inflated corporate valuations, disruption to market supply and demand from liquidity concentration, and concerns over investment overheating persist. Yet amid all the uncertainty surrounding the SpaceX IPO, one thing has become clear: the dynamism of America's innovation ecosystem and capital markets.
Back in 2002, when Musk founded the company and laid out his vision of "colonizing Mars," SpaceX was dismissed as little more than the "delusion" of an eccentric entrepreneur. Three failed rocket launches deepened the distrust. Even so, several American venture capital firms continued making bold investments in a high-risk company whose very survival was uncertain. As a result, SpaceX produced a stream of "world-first" innovative achievements, including reusable rockets, private crewed spacecraft, and satellite internet. Having risen as an unrivaled private space company, SpaceX is now making a decisive bet to realize an even grander and more innovative vision.
The SpaceX listing carries major significance for the U.S. stock market as well. In the United States, innovative companies in new industries have steadily entered the market—Apple (1980) and Microsoft (1986) in the 1980s, Amazon (1997) and Nvidia (1999) in the 1990s, and Alphabet (2004), Tesla (2010), and Meta (2012) in the 21st century—replacing aging firms and drawing in more investment. If OpenAI and Anthropic—artificial intelligence (AI) "hectocorns" (unlisted companies valued at more than $100 billion) pursuing listings within the year following SpaceX—succeed in raising large-scale capital, the U.S. stock market is expected to undergo yet another structural overhaul centered on the future industries of space and AI. The natural virtuous cycle in which innovation leads to investment, and investment drives growth and strengthens economic fundamentals, is the strongest competitive edge of America's capital markets.
Unlike the United States, where a series of mega IPOs are waiting in line, Korea's stock market struggles to find new faces that will lead the market 10 or 20 years from now. There is a reason why Samsung Electronics remains the unshakable No. 1 by market capitalization, then and now. Even amid the recent unprecedented rise in the KOSPI index, the IPO market is in an ice age. The number of companies newly listed on the domestic market this year stands at 14, down 58.8% from the same period last year. Only one company—K Bank—has listed on the KOSPI.
On top of this, the government has pulled out a new IPO regulatory card, further shrinking an already contracting market. This stands in contrast to U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Chairman Paul Atkins, who has set "Make IPO Great Again" as a goal and is pushing to ease outdated regulations, including relaxing the stringent disclosure obligations applied to large companies preparing to list and simplifying registration procedures. When the Financial Services Commission announced in March this year a policy to ban dual listings in principle, the IPO plans of large corporate affiliates preparing to list all came to a halt. The new regulation may prevent "spin-off listings," but it could also shackle the growth of innovative businesses. While it would be good for unicorn companies with independent governance structures to invigorate the market, the "growth penalty," under which regulations increase as a company grows larger, and the wall of insufficient growth capital remain high. In Korea, the process by which a startup scales up through unicorn status into a global corporation is as difficult as passing through the eye of a needle.
Peter Howitt, a professor at Brown University in the United States and last year's Nobel laureate in economics, emphasized "creative destruction," in which companies with new technology replace old businesses and firms, and advised that Korea's economy needs to build an innovative corporate ecosystem. If large corporations are excluded through regulations such as corporate venture capital (CVC) restrictions and bans on dual listings, it will be difficult to complete the growth ladder for businesses. From an investor's perspective, there is no reason to remain in a market where new innovative companies to lead future industries fail to emerge. For a next-generation leading company to emerge as a successor to "Samjeonix," Korea too must eliminate unnecessary regulations and create a path for innovative growth.
