Trading in shares of Elon Musk’s SpaceX began on the Nasdaq on Friday in the largest initial public offering in history, instantly valuing the rocket and satellite company at $1.77 trillion and putting Musk on the brink of becoming the world’s first trillionaire.
SpaceX priced 555.6 million shares at $135 each late on Thursday, raising approximately $75 billion and surpassing Saudi Aramco’s $29 billion debut in 2019 by more than $45 billion to claim the record for the largest IPO ever completed, according to RedState. The valuation makes SpaceX the seventh most valuable public company in the United States, ahead of Tesla, which carries a market capitalisation of around $1.6 trillion.
Musk’s roughly 38 per cent stake in SpaceX is worth somewhere between $644 billion and $866 billion at the IPO price, according to CryptoBriefing. Combined with his existing Tesla holdings — which stood at around $795 billion as of Thursday afternoon, according to Forbes — Musk’s total net worth is now flirting with the $1 trillion mark. Variety reported that Musk will retain voting control of “north of 82 per cent” of SpaceX following the listing, though he is barred from selling any shares for one year.
The debut is also expected to create significant wealth among SpaceX’s workforce, with up to 4,000 employees becoming new millionaires. A smaller inner circle of around 400 staff stand to earn as much as $100 million each, with a few dozen potentially walking away with more than $500 million.
In a livestream ahead of the opening of trade, Musk revealed that SpaceX has been cash-flow positive since around 2015, though analysts note that Starlink remains the company’s only clearly profitable division. According to RedState, SpaceX reported $18.7 billion in revenue during 2025, up 33 per cent on the previous year, with more than half of that — roughly $11 billion — coming from Starlink, which now serves over 10 million subscribers worldwide.
One of the most striking figures in SpaceX’s IPO filing was its claimed “total addressable market” of $28.5 trillion — equivalent to roughly 88 per cent of the entire US economy. SpaceX president and chief operating officer Gwynne Shotwell told CNBC the company sees itself as a competitor in artificial intelligence as well as space, a segment that accounts for a significant portion of that figure. “We are builders, we build our own launch vehicles, we build our launch sites, and we’re building data centers both on the ground as well as in orbit soon,” she said.
Variety reported that SpaceX’s xAI division, which includes the social media platform X, posted a $6.36 billion operating loss in 2025 on $3.2 billion in revenue, with capital expenditure for the AI business reaching $7.7 billion in the first three months of 2026 alone — a sharp acceleration from $12.7 billion for the whole of 2025. X generated around $1.8 billion in advertising revenue in 2025, less than half the $4.5 billion Twitter reported in 2021, with only 4.4 million paying subscribers among its roughly 550 million monthly active users.
Some Wall Street observers have drawn comparisons with the troubled 2012 market debut of Facebook, now Meta Platforms, which launched at $38 a share before immediately falling to $18 and closing the year well below its offering price. Others see a more favourable parallel. “For me, the analogy is Amazon. This was a company that changed the way we live,” Nancy Tengler, chief executive of Laffer Tengler Investments, told the Daily Mail. “If you go back and look at Amazon since its IPO, the stock is up more than 243,000 percent. The question becomes: what’s your time horizon, and do you believe in the technology?”
Gabelli Funds portfolio manager John Belton struck a similarly long-term note. “SpaceX is the ultimate growth stock. I think this is a company with significant growth potential ahead of it,” he said. “It’s definitely going to be a long-term story, and I think it will take time for the stock to find its footing in the public markets. But there are a lot of exciting opportunities ahead.”
The huge retail investor interest in the listing reflects what Shotwell described as Musk’s broader ambitions for the company. “He’s trying to make space open for everybody,” she said. “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.” SpaceX’s debut comes ahead of expected IPOs later this year from AI heavyweights Anthropic and OpenAI, both of which have filed confidential paperwork with the SEC for their own public offerings.
