SpaceX Shatters Records in Historic $75 Billion IPO

SpaceX, Elon Musk’s rocket, satellite, and artificial intelligence company, went public on Friday in what is being called the largest initial public offering in history, raising $75 billion and instantly making its founder the world’s first trillionaire. The landmark debut marks a watershed moment for commercial space exploration and the convergence of space technology with artificial intelligence investing.

The Largest IPO Ever

SpaceX priced its IPO at $135 per share late Thursday, selling 555.6 million shares to raise $75 billion — more than doubling the previous record of $29.4 billion set by Saudi Aramco in 2019. The offering valued the company at $1.77 trillion, making it the seventh most valuable publicly traded company in the United States, ahead of Musk’s own Tesla.

On its first day of trading under the ticker SPCX on the Nasdaq, shares opened at $150 — an 11% gain from the IPO price — and surged to a high of $176.52, pushing the company’s market capitalization above $2 trillion. According to Forbes, the debut boosted Musk’s fortune to an estimated $1.1 trillion, making him the first person in history to achieve trillionaire status.

A Journey From Near-Failure to Trillion-Dollar Company

Speaking via video from SpaceX’s Starbase facility in Texas as the Nasdaq opening bell rang in New York, Musk reflected on the company’s improbable journey. “I gave SpaceX less than a 10% chance of succeeding at all,” Musk said, as reported by Forbes. “To be clear, in fact, I told people this, I said, ‘Look, we’re probably going to fail, but you know, we should give it a try, because if we don’t, if there’s not a new company that enters space, we will never be a truly space-bearing civilization.’”

Founded in 2002 in a warehouse in El Segundo, California, SpaceX revolutionized spaceflight by developing reusable rockets — the Falcon 9, Falcon Heavy, and Starship. The company made more launch attempts than any individual country in 2025 and is now the world’s dominant launch services provider. Its ultimate mission: to colonize Mars.

Retail Investors Flock to SpaceX

The IPO allocated an unusually high 20-30% of shares to retail investors, reflecting Musk’s stated desire to let “regular people” participate. This generated massive demand, with over $100 billion in purchase orders flooding in, making the offering four times oversubscribed.

SpaceX President and COO Gwynne Shotwell, who rang the opening bell at the Nasdaq in New York, emphasized the significance of retail access. “He’s trying to make space open for everybody. He wanted this IPO, he wanted regular people to be able to buy the stock, and a lot of folks participated at the retail level,” she told CNBC.

The employee windfall has been equally dramatic. The IPO is expected to create approximately 4,400 employee millionaires, including about 400 staffers with stakes worth more than $100 million.

The Valuation Debate

SpaceX’s $1.77 trillion valuation is sharply contested. Bulls point to the $28.5 trillion total addressable market cited in the company’s prospectus, spanning AI enterprise applications, satellite internet, and space infrastructure. Shaun Maguire, a partner at Sequoia Capital, compared SpaceX to Nvidia, saying, “I personally have very high confidence in explosive revenue growth.”

Bears, however, note that SpaceX posted a $4.9 billion net loss on $18.7 billion in revenue in 2025, with cumulative losses of $41.3 billion since its founding. NYU finance professor Aswath Damodaran dismissed the $28.5 trillion TAM as “a hallucination,” and Morningstar values the company at $780 billion — less than half the IPO valuation.

Musk’s Unprecedented Control

Musk owns approximately 42% of SpaceX’s equity but controls about 82% of voting power through a dual-class share structure — an unprecedented level of control for a company of this size. His compensation plan is tied to ambitious goals including growing SpaceX’s market cap to $7.5 trillion and establishing a permanent human colony on Mars with at least one million inhabitants. A 366-day lockup period prevents Musk from selling his shares for the first year.

Market and Political Fallout

SpaceX’s debut had a notable “crowding out” effect on other space companies. Firefly Aerospace fell 18%, Rocket Lab dropped 10%, and Virgin Galactic plunged 34% as investors sold existing space holdings to buy SpaceX shares.

The IPO and Musk’s trillionaire status also drew immediate political response. Senator Elizabeth Warren called for a wealth tax, stating that “the typical American household would have to work more than 11 million years to make Elon Musk’s level of wealth.”

What’s Next

SpaceX’s public debut is the first of three anticipated mega-IPOs in the AI sector, with OpenAI and Anthropic expected to follow later in 2026. The Nasdaq changed its rules in May to allow fast-track index inclusion for large IPOs, potentially clearing the way for SpaceX to join the Nasdaq 100 within weeks.

For SpaceX, the challenge now is to deliver on its sky-high promises. The company’s business spans launch services, the Starlink satellite internet constellation (its only profitable segment), the xAI division with Grok AI models, and ambitious plans for space-based AI data centers and Mars colonization. Whether it can translate these ambitions into sustainable profitability — or whether the gravity of financial reality will pull it back to Earth — remains the defining question for investors who bought into the largest IPO in history.