Can I buy shares in Elon Musk's SpaceX?

From next week you can buy shares in Musk's Texas-based SpaceX, a company that is planning to colonise Mars and put artificial intelligence (AI) data centres in space.

It is set to be the largest ever public sale of shares and will make SpaceX one of the US's top ten largest listed firms.

But if you do, what exactly will you be buying and what are the risks?

SpaceX is currently owned by Musk and other private investors.

On 12 June millions of new shares in the company will go on sale and then will start trading publicly on the stock market in what is known as an Initial Public Offering, or IPO.

The IPO aims to raise a vast amount of money - at least $75bn - and gives investors the chance to buy into a business whose activities range from space exploration and satellite communication to the social media site X and the controversial AI platform Grok.

SpaceX is separate from Musk's most well-known company, the electric car maker Tesla, although it is thought the two may end up merging next year.

Musk plans to use the extra money he is raising to expand SpaceX's current activities but also to fund new future ventures: mining asteroids, colonising Mars and putting AI data centres in space.