Lead banks managing SpaceX’s $75 billion initial public offering have instructed the full underwriting syndicate not to accept orders from investors in mainland China and Hong Kong, Bloomberg reported Friday, citing people familiar with the matter. A separate Reuters review confirmed the ban at the technical level: SpaceX’s website and IPO marketing documents return an “Error 1009” message to users in both mainland China and Hong Kong — the most common reason for which, Cloudflare says, is that the website owner has actively blocked the country or region. Documents remain accessible in most other major Asian markets. The ban covers both institutional and retail investors, including private banking clients. SpaceX and the five lead banks — Bank of America, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, and Morgan Stanley — declined or did not respond to requests for comment.
SpaceX kicked off its U.S. roadshow Thursday, targeting $75 billion in proceeds at a valuation of $1.75 trillion — which would rank it immediately among the ten most valuable U.S.-listed companies and mark the largest IPO in global history. The exclusion stands in contrast to Elon Musk’s deep commercial ties to China, where Tesla is among the most popular foreign brands. The security rationale has precedent: in February 2026, two Democratic senators called on the Pentagon to review SpaceX after court filings surfaced showing that Chinese investors had quietly accumulated stakes in the company through Cayman Islands and British Virgin Islands structures. Francis Fong, honorary president of the Hong Kong Information Technology Federation, noted that while Hong Kong users have occasionally been blocked from some U.S. government websites, such restrictions from major commercial companies are uncommon. SpaceX is one of at least three major tech IPOs anticipated this year alongside Anthropic, which has already filed confidentially, and OpenAI.