SpaceX’s corporate controller recalls fast-paced IPO

SpaceX went public in June, raising a record-breaking $75 billion that put the company at a nearly $1.8 trillion valuation. The quick pacing of the transaction was perhaps fitting for a company that builds rocket ships, but one of its finance leaders said she “wouldn’t change a thing” with respect to the speed it required.

“Time can be your enemy,” Courtney Zeppetella, SpaceX VP and corporate controller, said on a panel at Workiva’s Amplify conference in September.

Whereas it could take up to two years for some companies to get ready for an IPO, Zeppetella told a packed conference room in Las Vegas that she found out in “early winter” that SpaceX intended to go public. The company confidentially filed a draft Form S-1 on March 30.

“Sometimes 12 and 18 months feels very far away, and so I think it is sometimes hard to get people to focus on the things that they need to focus on,” Zeppetella said.

SpaceX pulled off its accelerated feat in no small part because of its preparation. In describing the process, Zeppetella and her fellow panelists had some advice for companies with IPOs in their sights.

Ignition switch. The IPO process wasn’t a cold start. When Zeppetella joined the company in 2024 from Madison Square Garden Entertainment, she came in with the attitude of “let’s just get ready for being public even if we never go public.” Being public means being “heavily focused on the close,” and staying public is about “maintaining the ability to report your numbers quickly and accurately and completely every quarter,” she said.

“I came in and [said], ‘OK, let’s do all these things in preparation,” Zeppetella recalled. “And who cares if we never go public? It’s just great practice.”

Josh Gertsch, a senior industry principal at Workiva, told the audience it’s a “common theme” he and his colleagues hear from public companies: They wished they’d started IPO prep work earlier. In addition, from his observations, “companies [that] have sound processes, they’re valued higher. They do better in transactions.”

“More and more with this pace of change, if you want to go out and raise capital, the more sound infrastructure you can have, the more of an asset you have in your readiness that will bring an ROI to it,” Gertsch said.

Hiring. Not everything on the IPO checklist needs a head start, according to Shari Mager, who leads KPMG’s US capital markets readiness practice. (KPMG helped advise SpaceX on its IPO.) For instance, drafting an S-1 can wait for a bit, Mager said. But finance teams should start early on hiring the needed reporting expertise.

“A piece of advice I would give is to start building the team early,” Mager told the audience. “It doesn’t have to be a huge team, but bringing in that SEC reporting, that technical expertise, maybe it’s around controls, but just operating in a public company environment [and] not waiting until the actual IPO process to start bringing those people on board [is important].”

Finance teams should also get good at forecasting sooner than later, Mager added. “If you haven’t exercised that muscle of forecasting accurately, repeatedly, and really fine-tuned it over time, that’s something you can’t do overnight.”

Document control. During the IPO ramp-up, Zeppetella was “super focused” on “where [was] the S-1 going to live and how [was] it going to be controlled.” The choice was whether to take the “traditional” route of using a financial printer or using software for digital filing.

Zeppetella’s previous company, Madison Square Garden, outsourced to a printer when spinning off parts of its business. “I really hated losing control of the document,” she said. When using a third party, “what happens is after the deal is over, everyone leaves—the bankers are gone, the lawyers are gone—and…now you’ve got to roll forward all your documents, and it’s not easy and it’s not very efficient.”

For Zeppetella, the decision to maintain control of the documentation process was “by far the best decision we ever made.” But doing that required coordination of all parties involved. Her team controlled the financial statements and MD&A. “The rest of the document kind of got carved up” between other stakeholders—for instance, the legal team handled the risk factors.

Maintaining control over the document also helped SpaceX meet its aggressive filing deadline. Zeppetella recalled working with her head of financial reporting and technical accounting to make some last-minute changes the night before filing.

“I think with our speed, there’s no way we would have been able to do that if we had to send that off to a third party,” she said.