SpaceX used a $20 billion bridge loan to slash Musk’s debt costs in half, IPO filing reveals

Elon Musk’s strategy of folding his companies into one conglomerate is already paying off. Regulatory documents filed ahead of SpaceX’s historic IPO reveal that the company secured a $20 billion bridge loan from a group of major banks. That loan was used to retire $17.5 billion of high-interest junk debt accumulated by X and xAI.

The financial benefit is stark. The junk bonds and leveraged loans carried interest rates as high as 12.5 per cent. The bridge loan’s effective rate was 4.58 per cent as of 31 March, according to the filing. That gap cuts the combined annual interest bill roughly in half, to around $900 million.

The bridge loan was arranged by Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, and Morgan Stanley. It matures in September 2027 and can be prepaid at any time. SpaceX is required to use proceeds from certain debt financings and the IPO itself to repay at least some of the loan within six months of receiving the cash.

The debt trail starts with Musk’s 2022 acquisition of Twitter. That deal loaded the social media company with roughly $12.5 billion in borrowings, creating what became one of Wall Street’s most notorious hung-debt situations. The banks that underwrote the deal were unable to sell the debt to investors for years. They ultimately succeeded in offloading it last year.

Then xAI acquired X in March 2025 in a $33 billion all-stock deal. Three months later, Morgan Stanley arranged an additional $5 billion debt raise for xAI. The floating-rate portion carried an interest rate of 7 percentage points over the benchmark, while the fixed-rate notes yielded roughly 12 per cent. Demand was modest by junk-market standards.

When SpaceX acquired xAI in February 2026, valued at $1.25 trillion combined, Morgan Stanley told existing lenders the entire debt pile would be repaid in full. The bridge loan was the mechanism.

The refinancing cleaned up SpaceX’s balance sheet ahead of what is expected to be the largest IPO in history. The company is targeting a listing on Nasdaq under the ticker SPCX at a valuation of roughly $1.75 trillion, with a raise of up to $75 billion.

But the debt picture is not entirely simple. Beyond the bridge loan, SpaceX listed another $9 billion of “other financings” in the filing, including obligations tied to AI infrastructure assets recorded as failed sale-leaseback transactions. The company also has an undrawn revolving credit facility of up to $5 billion, increased from $1.5 billion in May.

The filing arrives at a moment when Musk’s empire is under intense scrutiny. SpaceX lost roughly $4.9 billion in 2025 on revenue of more than $18 billion. The S-1 includes 38 pages of risk factors, from Musk’s personal involvement in government affairs to the viability of orbital AI data centres.

For investors weighing the IPO, the bridge loan manoeuvre illustrates both the financial engineering that Musk’s conglomerate makes possible and the sheer scale of debt it carries. SpaceX’s public debut will test whether the market values that combination as a strength or a risk.