Google and SpaceX don’t appear to be obvious business partners on the surface — one is a search and online advertising behemoth, while the other makes spacecraft and launches satellites into outer space. But behind the scenes, Alphabet has placed a bet that few mainstream investors even seem to have registered at the time. It’s a relatively small one in percentage terms, but if SpaceX does eventually go public at the valuation being floated today, Alphabet could transform that early bet into one of the largest windfalls on what is already an unparalleled record of modern tech investing.
The tale reaches back almost a decade. Google — via Alphabet’s corporate parent company — invested about $900 million in SpaceX in 2015 as part of a funding round that valued Elon Musk’s space-faring company at roughly $12 billion. That deal left Google with something like a seven-percent stake in SpaceX, and it was significant in that it came when the notion of a successful commercial private space company was at best speculative. Jump forward to late 2025, and SpaceX is apparently readying itself for a public offering, with people familiar with the matter suggesting that its valuation could reach somewhere in the region of $1.5 trillion. That’s an unthinkably high value compared to where SpaceX was a decade ago. If that valuation holds and SpaceX does go public at that level, Google’s stake alone would be worth about $111 billion — a remarkable return for an early investment of just tens of millions.
What’s making that possible is the sheer size of SpaceX’s expansion. The company continues to dominate commercial rocket launches, and its Starlink satellite-internet business has exploded in size, adding millions of subscribers around the world and contributing exponential growth in revenue. SpaceX has also talked with potential underwriters and other banks about IPO plans for 2026 or later, according to multiple reports, some of which suggest the company could seek to raise more than $30 billion in the offering, potentially making it one of the largest PSOs ever.
Google’s benefit isn’t just theoretical. And in early 2025, Alphabet revealed $8 billion of unrealized profit from its stake in SpaceX factor into its quarterly earnings. That gain accounted for a big chunk — about 25 percent — of Alphabet’s net income in that period and underscores just how high SpaceX’s valuation had already soared even before it ever went public.
There’s also a strategic angle. The Google investment was not just financial. At the time, the company and SpaceX were in talks to underpin Google Cloud’s integration with the Starlink satellite network, which would offer high-speed internet across the globe. That strategic alliance in turn validated the rationale for the investment: SpaceX was not just selling space hardware but solidifying infrastructure that could one day serve at scale large data, connectivity and cloud workloads.
There’s also a strategic angle. The Google investment was not merely financial. At the time, the tech giant and SpaceX were in discussions about supporting Google Cloud’s service edgepoints at Starlink’s network infrastructure exchange points to deliver quick cloud services. That strategic partnership buttressed the investment’s thesis: SpaceX wasn’t just a space hardware business; it was erecting infrastructure that might one day support massive data, connectivity and cloud workloads.
That isn’t to say the $1.5 trillion number is assured. Valuations can move between private-market trading and IPO pricing, and wider economic conditions will determine how much investors are prepared to pay when SpaceX finally goes public. There have also been rumors of SpaceX share trades valuing the company at about $800 billion on secondary markets — still huge, but significantly shy of the $1.5 trillion figure that some reports suggest.
But whether the final I.P.O. valuation lands at $1 trillion, $1.5 trillion or somewhere in between, Alphabet’s early investment has set it up to cash in massively if SpaceX goes public. For Google, that’s a rare chance to cash in on an early bet it made on a business well outside its core one — rocket engines and satellite broadband — and turn it into real shareholder value when shares go public.
In an era when the Silicon Valley heavyweights are increasingly starry-eyed about investments in AI or cloud computing, Google’s SpaceX bet is a reminder that sometimes the most lucrative payoffs come from investing where others look past.
